Hand-Painted Pop! Art and Appropriation, 1961 to Now

Evolving alongside Abstract Expressionism, epitomized by Jackson Pollock’s signature drip paintings, Pop art, particularly in its advent, featured pictures that were visibly hand-painted, exemplified by MoMA’s Girl with Ball by Roy Lichtenstein and Water Heater by Andy Warhol, both from 1961. However, Pop artists’ choice of representational subject matter clearly departed from abstraction. They focused on imagery largely derived from mass media and popular culture, including newspapers, magazines, film, and television. The Lichtenstein and Warhol paintings were drawn directly from newspaper ads; facsimiles of these source images accompany the paintings.

Hand-Painted Pop! presents a selection of Pop-inspired works (as well as their familiar sources) by artists including Robert Arneson, Dulce Chacón, Rosalyn Drexler, Sam Durant, Robert Longo, Christian Marclay, Cady Noland, Richard Pettibone, Richard Prince, Wayne Thiebaud, Hank Willis Thomas, and Tom Wesselmann.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.