American culture was forever changed in the 1960's. Every walk of life in America had a new beginning because of the changes society endured. The art world was no different, radical thinking and new ideas prevailed in all areas of art. Two men would forever change the thinking, subject matter, and techniques of artists. They where born around the same time, in relatively same areas with the same upbringing. They were both called "pop artists" they where Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein and the impact these men had on the art world will never be forgotten.

Before even trying to understand the impact both of these men had on the art world their niche in it, has to be explained. Popular Art (or pop art) was a visual arts movement of the 1960s in the United States. Images pop artists used were taken from mass culture and society and were everyday objects. Artists duplicated beer bottles, soup cans, comic strips, road signs, and similar objects in paintings, collages, and sculptures. Others incorporated the objects themselves into their paintings or sculptures, sometimes in a startlingly modified form. Roy Lichtenstein was an artist that extended the range of pop art with h

This is where Roy Lichtenstein differed from Andy Warhol. Lichtenstein a more educated and trained artist "abandoned De Kooning and began making pictures based on comics and commercial art, painting them in the flat, mechanical style of commercial art, in simple colors, with Ben-Day dot backgrounds."

In the Car Roy Lichtenstein, silk screen on canvas Marilyn Diptych Andy Warhol, silk screen on canvas

Warhol and Lichtenstein had many of the same influences because they were both in New York City at the same time seeing basically the same thing. Jasper Johns was an artist in New York City at a time right before Warhol and Lichtenstein arrived. He became a father figure to an art movement that was just beginning to receive the name pop art. Johns was a painter who would create works of art that were gigantic flags. He was also influencing other artists of the time not just Warhol and Lichtenstein. But his real influence came in the fact that he was the first New York City artist to receive fame and fortune (even on a small scale) which led other artists of the time to believe they could become famous as well.

Cartoon-like pictures made giant size showing a man and a woman. It would be considered popular art first because of the way the images appear in the work. The man and woman together give a psychic impression that it is just another cartoon in a publication such as the New York Times. It was just that impression that led people to link Roy Lichtenstein with pop art.

Warhol was always interested in techniques that enabled multiplication of an image, such as silk-screen painting. It was this use of silk-screening which made it possible to reproduce his images as exactly as he did. Warhol's goal was to be a machine, he didn't create in a studio he created in his own aptly named "Warehouse." It was Warhol's use of silk screenings however that led many to compare him to Lichtenstein. In fact "Leo Castelli, the dealer who launched Lichtenstein's career, initially refused to represent Warhol on the grounds that his work was too similar" (to Lichtenstein's.)

Probably the most famous piece Andy Warhol ever created was his silk screen paintings of Marilyn Monroe. "Warhol felt the fame of Monroe, a superstar destroyed by inability to accept the image manufactured for her, was just as much a product, just as much a selling line, as a row of green coke bottles or reproductions of the Mona Lisa."

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Approximate Word count = 1817
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)