Why Was the Work of Andy Warhol in the 1960’s?

A2 Art Essay: Why was the work of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein immediately popular in the 1960’s? Roy Lichtenstein rapidly became popular in the 1960’s with his very original pop art pieces which he based many on comic strips, advertisements or newspapers. These tended to be the main inspiration for his work; this is because the subjects would tend to be exceedingly emotional and melodramatic. He became an idol to the American culture by adding in comic book characters which were very popular at the time.
One of his most renowned pieces that he made was almost certainly ‘WHAAAM! ’ which is based on an image from ‘All American Men of War’ published by DC comics in 1962. This is a wonderful piece that reflects strongly what life was like around that period of time, this made it extremely popular amongst the people. The painting shows a rocket being fired from an aircraft into an enemy plane, with a large red-and-yellow explosion on the plane being hit. The cartoon is made a great deal more dramatic by the use of the onomatopoeic lettering “Whaam! and the boxed caption on the top left of the painting reading, “I pressed the fire control… and ahead of me rockets blazed through the sky… ” like the painting “WHAAAM! ” many of Roy lichtensteins works were hard-edged with commercial techniques and he used flat and new colours which were used to portray culturally-popular ‘pop’ images. Another one of my favourite pieces is ‘Girl with ribbon’ I find it portrays a strong sense of emotion to viewers, like many of his other pieces it only tells a snippet of the story and the rest is left to the viewers imagination.
This is the aspect that I love the most, each of his pictures are overly dramatic with sometimes a speech bubble to give you an idea of the story behind the painting, it really makes the viewer think about the piece and let their imagination run wild and decipher meanings for themselves. This is what I am planning on achieving through my coursework, I have studied various works of Roy Lichtenstein’s and through taking photos, have designed my own pieces that also tell a story. Andy Warhol is another New York artist that developed in this genre that used very similar techniques to Roy Lichtenstein.