Chapter 5
Pop Art

People were beginning to talk about Johns and Rauschenberg. Some called them the “New Realists” because they painted real things. A May 1962 article in Time magazine called it the “Slice-of-Cake School” of art, because of artist Wayne Thiebaud’s paintings of ordinary food, like cake. The article included a picture of Andy standing in front of one of his soup can paintings, pretending to eat out of a can of soup.

By the end of the year, people were calling the new art “Pop Art,” which was short for “popular art.” Pop Art wasn’t about feelings and big ideas. It was about the things people saw in stores or on billboards or in fast-food restaurants. And Andy loved all those things.

Andy thought that it was okay to celebrate everyday life. He didn’t think that culture and art only had to be about serious and important things. It could also be about common, fun, inexpensive things. He said that he painted what he liked. And Andy liked painting things that shocked people.

In 1962, Andy made a big change in the way he painted by using the silk-screen process. Silk screening begins by cutting an image into a stencil, then attaching it to a mesh screen. The screen is placed over a piece of paper or fabric. When ink is pushed across the screen with a squeegee, the ink leaves a print of the image.

With silk screening, Andy could cover a canvas with rows of the same printed image by using the same stencil over and over. Andy loved the process because it looked like the pictures were printed by a machine. But he still could change how each picture looked by using different colors or making the image blurry. He filled canvases with pictures of the rock star Elvis Presley and the movie star Marilyn Monroe.

For the Marilyn pictures, Andy painted a slash of red on the canvas where her lips would be printed, and blue where she would have blue eye shadow. He painted an outline of yellow for her hair. Sometimes when he printed, the stencil didn’t line up exactly with the colors. The lip color might be partly on her cheek and the eye shadow would be next to her eyelids, not on them. Andy believed that mistakes—and images that looked less than perfect—could be interesting.

People began to know Andy’s name after the Time magazine article and Ferus Gallery show. He sold some paintings. But he still hadn’t had a New York show. He worried that he would fall behind the other Pop Art artists.

But then Eleanor Ward offered Andy his own show at the Stable Gallery. He also had been asked to take part in a group show with several other artists, called The International Exhibition of New Realists, at the Sidney Janis Gallery, also in New York City. The Janis Gallery was the first established New York City gallery to show Pop Art.

The New Realists show was a huge success. Newspapers and magazines wrote about it. Andy’s show at the Stable opened only a week later and drew big crowds that included many young people. They weren’t usually part of the wealthy, older art gallery crowd. But they were interested in Pop Art.

Andy had to wait longer than the other Pop artists to get his own show, but that turned out to be a good thing. By the time his show opened, people knew about Pop Art. They wanted to see it. Every painting in the show at the Stable sold. Andy was a success.