This is a case study about the relationship between The Pop Art movement and the society of the image characterized by materialism and consumerism.

1. Art and Advertising
Andy Warhol and the
Pop Art
by Dario Lo Presti

2. Introduction
Advertising is a form of art, or art itself is an advertising activity?
 Modern art and publicity are born together with the great social,
technological and distributive changes that have modified the
principles of art.
 Industrial revolution, technical reproducibility, multiplication of
the products turned into commodity, diffusion of the information and
the building of the net of transports go together with the change of
artist’s figure, of the public, the work’s form and the statute of art.
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3.  The posters of Toulouse Lautrec
represented with strong and immediacy
the atmosphere of the time.
T. Lautrec, Moulin Rouge: la Goulue, 1891
 Depero takes from the publicity and
communication the same playful and
happy spirit that will be the essence of his
style.
F. Depero, Campa con Campari, 1928 3

4.  In the late 1950s and 1960s the conceptual art breaked the taboo of
the oneness and not reproducibility of art’s work, expressing the
idea that a photo, an object of design or the packaging of a product
could become a symbolic phenomenon and so art.
 It will be really the Pop Art, above all with Andy Warhol, to
bring this process to the extreme consequences.
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5. Pop art and society of the image
 Pop art was an art
movement in the late 1950s
and 1960s that reflected
the growing materialism
and consumerism in society.
Andy Warhol, Marilyn, 1967
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6. Pop artists used popular images, that were developed through the
industral production and the media, as their sources including:
• Advertising (Coca-Cola)
• Product packaging (Brillo boxes)
• Celebrities (E. Presley)
• Comic Strips (Girl with Ball, Roy
Lichtenstein)
• Photographs (Jackie Kennedy) Close Cover Before Striking
(Pepsi-Cola), 1962
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7. Andy Warhol
“It perhaps is not the life a series of images, that change only in
the way to be repeated?”
Andy
Warhol
 Warhol liked to produce art
work based around to a
something that was common
at the time. Campbell’s Soup
was very popular in USA
during the 1960s.
Campbell’s Soup I, 1968
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8. Warhol used two essential techniques to give visibility to those images of
consumption.
The first is the isolation and expansion of the image (as in portraits of
Marylin Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor).
The second, and more important, is the serial repetition of the subject that
loses its daily function separating itself from the real world.
Early Colored Liz, 1963 Five Coke Bottles,1962
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9. From the publicity to the art
 Warhol had the genial idea taking objects of daily use and gave
them importance of “art”. He raised questions about the nature of
art:
Knives, ca. 1981- 82 Brillo boxes installation
Stable gallery of New
York, 1964
What’s the true work of art? 9

10. Conclusions
 With the Pop Art and Andy Warhol the art establishes a strong
relationship with the system of the mass-media, particularly with
the advertising, using the same depersonalizing and repetitive
languages.
 Through his work, Warhol brings out prominence some values
of mass-communication:
1. The loss of contents
2. The “death” of the image 10

11. Bibliography
• Boatto Alberto, Warhol:Art dossier, Giunti, Firenze, 1995.
• Calvesi Maurizio and Boatto Alberto, Pop Art: Art dossier,
Giunti,Firenze, 1989.
• Grazioli Elio, Arte e Pubblicità, Mondadori, Milano, 2001.
• Trotta Mauro, La pubblicità, Ellissi, 2002.
• www.pittorifamosi.it
• www.paopao.it/index.php/esposizioni-collettive/132-sold-out
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