Everyday things
•The use of everyday things in art became popular around the mid 1950’s with the Pop Art movement, although earlier artists such as Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp had experimented with using common everyday materials such as newspapers and cardboard, bicycle wheels and seats to create collages and sculptures.
•Look at work such as Picasso’s Guitar, Sheet Music, and Wine Glass, 1912, Mandolin and Clarinet and Bull’s Head, 1943 and Duchamp’s ‘readymades’, including Bicycle Wheel, 1913 and The Bottle Rack, 1914.
•Artists became interested in popular culture and they borrowed images and objects from everyday life including the mass media, pulp fiction, comic books and supermarket shelves. Look at the work of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol’s ‘Campbells’s soup cans’ screenprints.
•Everything was seen as being a potential subject for an art work and artists employed a variety of art forms.
•Using everyday objects in art meant a departure from conventional still life paintings and a challenge to the traditions and preciousness of fine art in general. Look at Still Life On a Glass Table, 1971 by British artist David Hockney.
•Many artists employed commercial methods of production, such as silk-screen printing, to produce multiple images. Andy Warhol was known for this type of production.
•Other artists took one everyday object such as a soup can, a hamburger or a clothes peg and elevated its status to that of an art object by celebrating its form and content in their work and in the process changing how and what we view as art. Have a look at some of the work of Wayne Thibault who paintings of food sound and look good enough to eat, Pies, Pies, Pies 1961, Cakes, 1963 and Confections, 1962.
Can you recognise any of these every day things? CLICK on the images below to find out more!
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