Pop Art Comparison of Seated Woman and Lavender Disaster

Pop Art Comparison of Seated Woman and Lavender Disaster

Pop Art was a Modern art movement that emerged durring the mid-twentieth century in both England and America. It first began to gain recognition in the early 1950’s, after about twenty years of Abstract, as artists altered their attention and looked to change. In the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, Pop Art became much more popular to the general public and successful for the movement’s artists due to the world growing tired of the repeditive forms of Abstract. Found in the Menil Collection, Seated Woman and Lavender Disaster are two examples of Pop Art. The comparison of these two pieces shows although they differ in medium and subject matter both Seated Woman and Lavender Disaster share common underlying themes possesed by all Pop Art.

George Segal was an American artist from New York. He began experamenting with the use of a new kind of medical bandage designed for setting fractures, and he developed a techniquie using these bandages to make plaster casts. This allowed Segal to produce a figure that kept the essential human traits with out great detail, and also enabled these figures to be cast directly from a live model. It is in this way that George Segal created Seated Woman in 1967.

Andy Warhol was a graphic artist, painter, and film maker, amoung other things, also associated with Pop Art. He moved to New York, around 1950, where he did his first advertisements as a comercial artist and, later, began showing in expositions. One technique employed by Warhol involved repeditive silk screen prints on canvas. He used this method to produce many series of prints with various, easily reconizable images. Between 1962 and 1964 in his self titled studio “The Factory”(Phaidon 484), Warhol produced over two thousand pictures. One of these, Lavender Disaster, was made in 1963 and belonged to a series of pictures all including the same image of an electric chair.

The subjet matter of these two Pop Art examples is for the most part quite different, although there are some similarities. George Segal’s piece is a white plaster figure on a wooden chair with a vinyl seat pad. The figure is sitting sideways in the chair, with her right side being closest to the back of the chair.