Impressionism

Pop Art

Pop Art is an art movement that started in the 1950s in America. It became most popular in the 1960s. Pop artist incorporated themes of mass media and pop culture in to their artworks such as comics, magazines, advertising, celebrities and other American iconography. A characteristic of pop art is that it removes the represented participant and isolates the object or combines it with other objects for consideration.

The leading figure in Pop Art is Andy Warhol. He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1928 and he was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker. Andy Warhol’s most famous artworks include Campbell's Soup (1968) and Marilyn Monroe (1962). The Andy Warhol Museum exists in memory of his life and artwork.


Another famous pop artist is Roy Litchenstein. He was born in Manhattan in 1923 and later became a prominent American pop artist. Art wasn’t included in his schools curriculum so Roy became interested in art and design as a hobby. He studied at the Art Students League of New York and then later at the Ohio State University. He described pop art as "not 'American' painting but actually industrial painting".

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White Rabbit

The piece of art that was most appealing to me was Lin Jiunting’s Beyond the Frame. The reason I like this artwork is that the artist has used multimedia technology to make it interactive allowing the viewers to become more active participants in the artwork. The piece consists of four screens displaying classic Chinese noble plants the plum, orchid, bamboo and chrysanthemum. These also represent the four seasons. The best part of the work is the four touch screens beneath each flower that allow the audience to play with the flowers and even create sounds by touching the strings of a musical instrument called a zither. The artist Lin Jiunting was born in 1970 and grew up in Taipei, Taiwan. He studied art in New York and was fascinated with “the constant transformation and boundary-breaking of contemporary Western art”. He now lives and works in Taipei and Shanghai.

The only artwork that I didn’t particularly like was Chen Wenling’s Valliant Struggle. The reason I don’t like this work is because it is far too exaggerated for example the pig has too many teeth making it look scary and gruesome. The only thing I like about this work is the symbols the artist has used like the pig which represents Chinese people today which is seen throughout a lot of his artworks. Chen Wenling was born in Anxi, Fujian China in 1969 and studied at the Xiamen Academy of Art and Design. He then studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. He is now living and working in Xiamen and Beijing as a professional artist.

I thought the excursion to the White Rabbit was quite beneficial because I got to see a whole new type of art and the culture behind it. Because of the guide I learnt about the thought that goes into these artworks and what influences the artists to create them. I also learnt that art can be expressed in many different ways, and not just traditional ways like sculpture and painting but through a unique and personalized way. For example there was an artwork that interested me because I haven’t seen many like it because it was created by manipulating light. There were an assortment of objects hanging from the ceiling with a spotlight pointed towards them creating an interesting shadow on the wall.

The White Rabbit gallery was founded by Kerr and Judith Neilson and mainly focuses on Chinese contemporary art. Judith Neilson opened up the gallery because she ran out of room to put her extensive art collection. The white Rabbit now has over 400 pieces of art making it one of the largest collections of contemporary Chinese art in the world.

Pop Art

Walter Gropius

Walter Gropius was born in 1883 in Berlin. He became an architect like his father and great uncle. Walter Gropius studied at the Technical Universities in Munich and Berlin. Gropius could not draw, and was dependent on collaborators and partner-interpreters throughout his career. He joined the office of Peter Behrens in 1910 and three years later established a practice with Adolph Meyer.

After serving in the First World War, Gropius became involved with several groups of radical artists that sprang up in Berlin in the winter of 1918. In March 1919 he was elected chairman of the Working Council for Art and a month later was appointed Director of the Bauhaus.

Walter Gropius believed that all design should be functional as well as aesthetically pleasing. His Bauhaus school pioneered a functional, severely simple architectural style, featuring the elimination of surface decoration and extensive use of glass. Walter Gropius gave up his position as director in 1927 but the Bauhaus existed until 1933.

When Gropius left the Bauhaus he resumed private practice in Berlin. Eventually, he was forced to leave Germany for the United States, where he became a professor at Harvard University. From 1938 to 1941, he worked on a series of houses with Marcel Breuer and in 1945 he founded "The Architect's Collaborative", a design team that embodied his belief in the value of teamwork.

Gropius's first large building, the Fagus Shoe-Last Factory in Alfred on the Leine in 1911 was materialized due to his connection with Peter Behrens and in cooperation with Adolf Meyer as had been the case with most of his early structures.

Gropius created innovative designs that borrowed materials and methods of construction from modern technology. This advocacy of industrialized building carried with it a belief in team work and an acceptance of standardization and prefabrication. Using technology as a basis, he transformed building into a science of precise mathematical calculations.

An important theorist and teacher, Gropius introduced a screen wall system that utilized a structural steel frame to support the floors and which allowed the external glass walls to continue without interruption.

Gropius died in Boston, Massachusetts in 1969.