Pop Art, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art

Pop Art rejected Abstract Expressionism's high seriousness in favor of the imagery of mass consumer culture: advertisements, celebrity photographs, comic strips, and supermarket products. Andy Warhol became its most famous practitioner, exhibiting thirty-two canvases of Campbell's Soup Cans in 1962, each depicting a different flavor rendered with the flat, impersonal precision of commercial packaging, and adopting silkscreen printing so that he could produce multiple near-identical images quickly, with assistants, in a studio he called The Factory. His Marilyn Diptych (1962), made shortly after Marilyn Monroe's death, repeats her publicity photograph in rows of gaudy, garish color and rows of fading black and white, treating a celebrity's face the way advertising treats a product, endlessly repeated until it verges on abstraction. Warhol's deliberate embrace of mechanical reproduction and commercial subject matter, along with his famous remark that he wanted to be a machine, directly challenged the Abstract Expressionist ideal of the painting as a unique expression of personal feeling.