The Picturesque Element in American Pop Art

or The Media in Disguise

Page II

Picturesque without being provincial, and rusticity aside, Pop Art is at one with a society interested in the values that bring together a global community. It became so by letting itself be inspired by everyday objects, by reiterating the quotidian and making it attractive to the urban middle and upper-middle classes. If one considers the extent of this phenomenon and the recognition it received, and still receives, what is striking is the indifference of Pop artists to an overt manifestation of feelings, which contrasts with what is usually meant by the word “picturesque.”

But also Pop Art is a style that dwells on the most manifest aspects of its geographical area and historical time. The Picturesque art of the eighteen-century played a similar role: That of making the public realize that the scenes represented on the “canvas” were speaking of its own specific, historical world, which considered the countryside a source of bucolic pleasures. And as such it was lived day after day; it was a public, accessible space.

I now turn to Andy Warhol—the major figure of Pop Art style and constantly referenced by those art critics and philosophers who focus on the aesthetics of the last century. Warhol is also important to my point that Pop artists indulge in the reiteration of images to put forth their world view. Warhol is not the only one to do so, and, therefore, I will look, later, at other Pop artists who help substantiate my interpretation.

Aside from the actual content of Warhol’s paintings is the importance of his technique, indicating as it does a new and different method of dealing with the canvas. Specifically, Warhol utilizes photographs and silkscreens, thus opening the way to serial multiplication. This facilitated production, so much so that a considerable part of his work was actually done by assistants—as was the accepted practice, certainly since the Italian Renaissance, when painters enlisted the aid of assistants in their botteghe. Warhol painted his famous Campbell soup cans starting with photographs, and indeed everything in his work relates to photographs. Yet, there are differences between a Warhol silkscreen and a straightforward realistic photograph. Certainly the portraits of Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe, reiterated many times, resemble these actresses, but, by repeating their images with the addition of colors and lines that underline the somatic traits of these visages, the impact on the viewer becomes stronger and more direct than if they were presented in a single image, especially considering the close resemblance to the initial photograph of these celebrities and the touches added by the artist. Such additions are all the more pleasantly effective because they are visually immediate and more noticeable than a black-and-white photograph.

Although viewers may be indifferent to the actual number of the repeated image, they will make a point of noticing how identical they are to each other. One can perhaps speak here of a desire to insist on a déjà vu that is nevertheless attractive because it is widely known, and, as such, does not require as great an interpretative effort on the part of the viewer as would be the case with an image never seen before. Warhol’s paintings are also worthy of admiration because they may evoke in the viewers the desire for the perceived fame, beauty, and wealth of the subject. The celebrity may be someone who people would like to imitate many times for a variety of reasons, either out of rivalry or simply out of enjoyment.

The theme of reiterations, which is part of the Pop Art’s technique and is also integral to its content, is not only used to glamorize the celebrities. It is also typical of Warhol’s Campbell soup cans, which speak of industry, commercials, and consumption. Their time is the now, which corresponds to an almost mythical reverence for the quotidian, spelled out with the sophisticated, smooth, and polished textures of the silkscreens.

From the formalist viewpoint, Pop Art’s aesthetics, especially in the work of Warhol, isolates objects from a potential background to put into relief their quality of frivolous and striking imagery. They are far from being chaotic even when juxtaposed one to the other with the overall effect of evoking vastness in all its virtual ambiguity.

There is a critical element in Pop Art: Its multiple images are narrated with detachment but not indifference. Warhol, for example, presents repeated images of Elizabeth Taylor—beautiful and haughty, as is necessary for an actress who must be protective of her image. But the artist, then, adds a few colored lines and blobs, so as to underscore the artificiality both of the photograph and of Taylor. However, Warhol did not—following Marcel Duchamp’s example—paint a defiling mustache on that beautiful face. Duchamp’s Mona Lisa had been a response to, among other things, the banalization of artistic icons. It was a provocation aimed at playing down what has been called “the most famous painting in the world.” But probably it was not a lack of courage that stopped Warhol from painting a mustache on the celebrity’s face, since, after all, it would have been merely an act of imitation on his part and nothing more.

Also, for Warhol the human element must be recognized for what it is, and resemblance must be in evidence. Consequently, he portrays the human face faithfully in his silkscreen paintings, even though it is elaborated in such a way by the artist’s creativity that it mirrors his own vision of what constitutes resemblance. The portraits must be instantly recognizable if they are to be seen as the icons of a mythical star system, and so the faces are shown preferably in close-up in order to have the strongest possible impact on the viewer. These public figures inhabit a world of material wealth that encourages them to stay in the public eye. They are far from the humble, self-effacing, and silent peasants of the British Picturesque paintings. The depicted celebrities inhabit the crowded city or the screen, they monopolize the paintings’ space in which bucolic landscapes have no role to play and where animals do not constitute a major element.

In Pop Art, landscapes have been replaced by appliances and other objects, sometimes hugely altered from their realistic sizes, like the telephone by Oldenburg, which is huge, black, and floppy. His soft sculptures of food such as cakes and ice cream are also to be mentioned in this context. In this way, Pop artists are saying that it is useless to moralize, to withdraw from the contemporary world. They are also indicating that their picturesque artworks are far from being a sign of provincialism. It is not, then, surprising that scale, for them, becomes a crucial element. An expanding world and oversized canvases identify the external objects and make them so noticeable that these paintings and three-dimensional objects become the definition of the objects themselves. In a similar manner, the comic strips of Roy Lichtenstein, with their Ben Day dots, announce themselves without any hesitation as resembling the vacuity of the comic strip—a “low genre” that is nevertheless welcomed day after day by popular newspaper readers.

The analogy between the Picturesque style of the eighteenth century and the picturesque aspects of Pop Art is based on their similar conception of what it means to feel at home in a given place and at a given time. However, the analogy must not be carried beyond its limits: The differences between the two styles are also to be taken into account. One difference concerns the fact that Pop Art is not sentimental, at least not explicitly so. This, in part, is because the public itself has changed: The not-necessarily sophisticated or classy public that fills the Museum of Modern Art in New York or wanders around the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh—and those who see the works of these painters reproduced in books and magazines—are absorbed in a specific social reality that has been expressed artistically through celebrated media figures. Pop Art, in fact, appropriates the ‘star system’ as it is displayed in magazines to indicate that luxury and frivolity are enjoyable matters. In this art there is no sentimental moralizing. As a matter of fact, there are not even heroes, notwithstanding Warhol’s portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Lenin, Elvis Presley, Freud, Queen Beatrix, and others. Instead, we have idols, often presented in provocative facial expressions or body postures. Yet, there is nothing offensive in these portraits. They tell us that art cannot dispense with the human face, although the artist can alter it with a few strokes of the brush, so that the realism typical of photographs is attenuated and the artistic element is, instead, intensified.

Given that Pop Art is one of the contemporary artistic versions of picturesque beauty, it invites a comparison to the Picturesque conception of beauty of the eighteenth century. Picturesque beauty was a matter of controversy in the eighteenth century and often considered a low art form related to genre painting without encompassing a wider range of contents. The beauty of the Picturesque rests on the serenity it produces in the viewer. Its paintings soothe by combining beauty with the then popular pictorial aspects of nature. Similarly, the beauty of Pop Art, to the extent to which this appellation can be applied to it, rests on the appropriation of popular themes and their transformation into sensuous images. The beauty of the Picturesque art of the past is, in effect, intensified by Warhol, who not only added zest to its images by dint of repetition, but also by enlarging them considerably in comparison to the original objects, as in the case of the soup cans or the Brillo box.

Short of an all-inclusive definition of beauty, it is important to consider that at least since the avant-garde movements of the past century (most notably since Paul Valéry), the concept of beauty has been the object of devaluation, considered unnecessary to the art scene of the contemporary world. Pop artists are among those who took notice of this devaluation, evidenced by their transition from high art themes to lower themes. Specifically, the transformation has to do with how this “new” concept of beauty has left behind the classical and objective characteristic of beauty when it was the mark of a discernible perfection, universally appreciable. As a consequence, these changes have made the concept of beauty so variable that it has become applicable to almost all arts genres and art products, except when they are overtly horrific or repulsive.

In addition, compared to the Picturesque beauty of the eighteenth century, Pop artists have transformed the idea of what can be beautiful. They have no reason to glorify the poverty of the cottages of the British countryside. Instead they glorify the abundance and affluence of the Western society of the twentieth century. For Pop artists beauty was not found in nature, it was always a matter of artificiality; and as to the painters and landscape artists of the Picturesque, their aim was to beautify nature not to disguise it.

Why still picturesque, then? The answer is to be found in the fact that the concept of beauty has gone through a transformation whereby it is no longer considered exclusively linked to the grand style. It has become—like the picturesque described by Gilpin and Price—akin to the pleasant and even the pretty to which a potentially vast public can relate. Beauty, then, can still be beauty without putting forward grand narratives. It can be circumscribed to the quotidian, whether the quotidian is per se, that is, objectively, beautiful or, minimally, pleasant to the eye. It is a beauty that has been elaborated by Pop artists, who—not too differently from their predecessors of the Picturesque movement—no longer consider beauty the essence of the pictorial arts, but, more humbly, something that can be easily imitated. Similarly, the picturesque as interpreted by Gilpin and Price is not a particularly stable concept and is, therefore, applicable to many different contents and styles. What is retained from the classical concept of beauty as being objective and universally valid is the ideal of harmony and proportion, but, given the subjectivity of taste, these qualities take a new form, and as a result they become historically relevant and interpretable with different theoretical tools.

So understood, the concepts of beauty and of the picturesque stand in sharp contrast with another aesthetic category, that of the sublime.

The idea of the sublime is no less controversial than the concept of beauty. Kant is still an authority on this issue, but it is an authority that has subsequently been “modernized.” Kant links the sublime to reason and imagination, and distinguishes the mathematical from the dynamical sublime. The first transcends human senses because of its magnitude; the second is elicited by the might of nature. Both elicit feelings of being overwhelmed by such immensity, and the pleasure it gives us differs from the pure pleasure elicited by beauty, which pleases without residual negative feelings. The combination of pleasure and pain makes the sublime ultimately beyond human understanding; it captivates the entirety of our being by evoking both negative and positive feelings.

The sublime presents us with a “beyond” of a spiritual nature, and since, for Kant, human knowledge is knowledge of phenomena, and therefore intrinsically finite, the sublime is not representable. Qua infinite, it has no epistemological value and, as a consequence, it is a sentiment that leaves reason bewildered. Such is the result of the lack of ontological foundation and the subsequent shifting made by Kant from the epistemological domain to the aesthetic one. For Schelling, the sublime is the excess produced by the crystallization of the infinite into the finite, and, although it is formless, it is intuited aesthetically, producing in us a catharsis. Hence, it relieves us from suffering and thus gives us a pleasure not different from that of beauty. For him, the sublime includes beauty within itself. It presupposes the absolute, the infinite; however, since these are never given in experience but only in intuition and feelings, the sublime only approximates the absolutely infinite. No wonder, then, that it is a rare occurrence.

Yet, the sublime resurfaces abruptly thanks to the artists belonging to the Abstract Expressionism movement. Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, to name just two, revolutionized the art scene in the Unites States and astonished Europe from the mid1940s until the late 1950s by breaking decisively with all forms of Romanticism and the picturesque landscapes of previous American generations. The Abstract Expressionist artists’ quest for the sublime is explained by their pursuit of an absolute, abstract style lacking any decorative quality. It is a sublime style derived from a negative ontology, or even an ontological void that repudiates figurative art. Instead, it paints intricate lines or patches of colors that attest to the expressiveness of sublime feelings. The leap—no less radical, if compared to that brought about by Abstract Expressionism—that led to Pop Art’s return to figurative art represents a parenthesis, almost an anomaly, if one considers the minimalism that came afterward. The fact remains, though, that Pop Art is unique, unmatched in the following decades, given the originality of its subject matter. Pop Art is also anti-sublime in that it is a return to a simplified idea of beauty, presenting beauty by way of easily recognizable themes that exclude any allusion to the infinite and to the complexity of the grand style.

Some considerations are now in order to look at the philosophical meaning of the Pop Art movement as a whole. To begin with, Pop Art is, as it calls itself, popular, which is not per se a limitation. However, it does imply that its declared aims oppose an aesthetic of the sublime. It is an anti-sublime art, remote from Nietzsche’s ideal of the grand style. To understand and develop these points it is sufficient in this context to consider that a sublime art does not necessarily choose as its themes heroic, mythical events on a grand scale. Although this is an aspect of the sublime common to both Romanticism and Classicism, it is not the only significant trait. As to the sublime in general, it is a consequence of the human capacity to embrace and also transform human reality in its totality. And since, from a vitalistic viewpoint, human drives urge individuals to experience life at the limit and beyond, the sublime feeling is connected to a fundamentally tragic view of life. The tragic and the sublime are closely related.

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