Pop Art

“Everything is beautiful. Pop is everything.” Andy Warhol (1928?1930?-1987), American Pop artist.

Growing up in the 70s, art was all about the works of Andy Warhol and Peter Max. We studied them in school, and had posters on our bedroom walls.

Andy Warhol, was a key figure in Pop Art, an art movement which emerged in America and elsewhere in the 1950s to become prominent over the next two decades. The Fauves used nonrepresentational color and representational form to convey different sensations. In the 1960s Andy Warhol created several mass-produced images from photographs of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Mao, Elvis Presley, and Jackie Onassis.

Peter Max was born as Peter Finkelstein in Berlin, Germany, and was raised in Shanghai, China, and in Israel before  his family settled in the United States in 1953. The young artist trained in New York at the Art Students League, Pratt Institute, and the School of Visual Arts. After completing his studies, Peter Max opened a design studio and gained success as a designer for books, posters and products. Max closed his studio in 1964 and began making his signature colorful silkscreens. Max’s art work was a part of the psychedelic movement in graphic design. His work was influential and much imitated in advertising design in the late 1960s and early 1970s. One of Continental Airlines’ Boeing 777 aircraft (registered N77014) sports a special livery designed by Max. Peter Max later evolved from a pop artist of the 1960s to Neo-expressionism. He works with multiple media, including oil, acrylics, water colors, fingerpaints, dyes, pastels, charcoal, pen, multi-colored pencils, etchings, engravings, animation cells, lithographs, serigraphs, silk screens, ceramics, sculpture, collage, video, xerox, fax, and computer graphics. He also includes mass media as a “canvas” for his creative expression. Max often uses American symbols in his artwork and has done paintings and projects for Presidents Ford, Carter, Reagan and Bush. Recently he created his 100 Clintons, a multiple portrait installation whose images were used through the four days of the Presidential inauguration. More recently, Max completed his fourth Grammy-Award poster, redesigned NBC television’s symbolic peacock, was appointed as the official artist for the World Cup USA 1994 and created a “Peace Accord” painting for the White House to commemorate a historic signing. See more of Peter Max’s art here.