3/4/13 - Women in Pop Art @ MoMA

Last night we decided to dedicate this week to visiting MoMA. I had already experienced some degree of insight into my feelings about the wonderful and confronting world of modern art during my visits to MoMa, first with Hans and Sue and then again with Bo and Kristie. But for Peter it was all new, so we decided to start with a guided tour.

The tour we took today was about ‘Women in Pop Art’. The guide started with Willem de Kooning’s 1950 – 1952 ‘Woman 1’.  At the time he created this work, de Kooning was a hugely popular artist, but this work took him, his like-minded artists and us on a journey into the brand new world of abstract expressionism. The figure departs from the usual portrayal of feminine form and is an amalgam of female archetypes. Many of the gallery’s young female followers are drawn to and admire its power. It was the start of our tour today because of its links with 1950’s pinup girls.

  

Next was New Yorker Roy Lichtenstein’s 1961 ‘Girl with a Ball’ using his bold colours and ‘ben-day dots’ he explored themes like commercialism and pop art. This led nicely on to a series of paintings

of Marilyn, a favourite amongst pop artists in the 60s particularly after her suicide in 1962.  

James Rosenquist’s 1962 ‘Marilyn Munroe 1’ connected the ‘commercial icon’ status of both Coca-Cola and Marilyn … in the process telling us something about the dehumanising effects of the modern consumerist society.

From here we moved on to Andy Warhol’s famous 1962 ‘Gold Marilyn’ in which he took a 1953 publicity still photograph of Marilyn made for the movie ‘Niagara’ and garishly made up her face and placed it on a gold background thus undermining her star status and making her, like the subjects of many of his other famous works, just another infinitely reproducible image.

Marisol Escobar’s highly suggestive use of a Coke bottle in the 1962 piece ‘Love’ was confronting and her 1967 ‘LBJ’, showing President Johnson as a ‘blockhead’ was biting. Does the LBJ’s body coffin represent the way in which he became President (the assignation of JFK) or is it a protest about the Vietnam War? And why are his wife and daughters offered up to us as fragile little ‘bird like’ characters out of his open palm?

Finally we moved on to consider Tom Wesselmann’s iconic 1966 ‘Mouth 7’, a work which shows only a mouth, where the lips are full and the mouth is open. It drew many comments about the role of women in history and how, in the 1960s, they were emerging not just as sex symbols but as sexual beings in their own right. Many earlier works had been a man’s view of women and their sexuality. By the 1960’s, with the onset of the woman’s liberation movement and the ready availability of the contraceptive pill the ‘times they were a changing’ for women. It took me back to discussions with my grandmother in the 1960’s about why her mail was addressed to ‘Mrs Matthew Clifford Williamson’ and the battles I had with Scotch College in the early 2000s when they refused to send our mail addressed to anyone other than Mr and Mrs Peter Sinden!