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Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the humanities and social sciences.
Augured in the 1950s in the work of neoDadaists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, the American incarnation of pop art, as it emerged in the 1960s, was a movement immersed in the visual languages, vernacular iconography and means of production of popular culture. Although the term was first applied to a group of British artists in the 1950s, even their work was largely based on the images of an American mass media.
Characterized by Andy Warhol’s silkscreened icons of American commodities and celebrity culture, Roy Lichtenstein’s billboard-sized homages to the graphic style and pathos of the comic strip and Claes Oldenberg’s monumental sculptures of household appliances and fixtures, pop art elevated the quotidian objects and concerns of postwar American culture into the rarified realm of high art, forever changing the meaning of that oncesanctified term.
Beyond its playful repetition of certain Dadaist strategies of quotation and appropriation and its reiteration of the Duchampian challenge to modernist autonomy and the institutions of art, pop art also evidenced a return to the thwarted political aspirations of Berlin Dada. Manifested most powerfully in James Rosenquist’s pictorial assaults on American militarism or Edward and Nancy Kienholz’s mixed-media indictments of the moral bankruptcy of American society even Warhol’s pictures ultimately oscillate between their veneer of bland complicity with and idolatrous celebration of contemporary popular culture and a more acute language of cultural critique.
Industry:Culture
Avant-garde visual arts movement that emerged in the early 1960s, characterized best by three-dimensional objects in simple geometric shapes. Central figures included Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd and Robert Morris. These artists drew on early twentieth-century avant-garde art by Marcel Duchamp and Soviet artists to develop an art of serial repetition of units, made of common industrial materials, including plywood, steel, Plexiglass, fluorescent light tubes and bricks. These artworks were often fabricated in commercial workshops. This was in part a critical response to the dominance of abstract expressionist styles that emphasized the private experience of the artist, and the gesture of the artist’s hand. As against modernist critical dicta, which held that the field of art was the exploration of its specific media, minimalism implied that art was equivalent to other, industrial forms of labor. The minimalists were theoretically sophisticated and wrote about their work in art journals, and some were concerned that their work should draw attention to the architectural conditions of the experience of art.
By the 1970s, when minimalism was established as a style, in the hands of some artists it degenerated into corporate lobby decoration.
Industry:Culture
Awarded annually by Columbia University since 1917, the Pulitzer Prize recognizes achievements in American journalism, letters, drama and music. The journalism category has fourteen separate awards, while the letters category offers awards for fiction, history, poetry, biography or autobiography and general non-fiction. A Pulitzer-Prize board makes recommendations for the prizes, which include a gold medal for public service in journalism and $5,000 awards for the other categories. Hungarian-born immigrant Joseph Pulitzer, publisher and owner of the St. Louis-Dispatch and the New York World, endowed both the Pulitzer Prizes and the Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
Industry:Culture
(1868 – 1963) Towering intellectual of the twentieth century remembered mostly for his opposition to Booker T. Washington’s polices of accommodation, and for his suggestion in Souls of Black Folk (1903) that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line” (1969:3). Generally overlooked in commemorations of Du Bois’ life are his contributions to the disciplines of sociology and history, his role as editor of the largest circulating newspaper among African Americans (The Crisis), his pivotal role in founding Pan-Africanism, his conversion to Marxism in the 1930s, the persecution he faced during the McCarthy years and his death while in exile in Ghana on the eve of the March on Washington.
Industry:Culture
(1869 – 1959) Wright’s buildings reinforce American ideals of democracy individual freedom and family. His inexpensive middle-class Usonian (United States-onian) homes and low, extended Prairie houses have led to the development of a uniquely American, suburban housing type. Consistent placement of the fireplace at the heart of a house was both a metaphorical and physical organizing principle. He utilized natural imagery and materials while accepting modern machinery demonstrated in the Fallingwater house, Larkin Building and the Guggenheim Museum. His promotion of the American natural and social landscape in architecture still influences design decades after his death.
Industry:Culture
(1874 – 1963) Poet. Frost’s poems of New England, nature, rural life and ordinary people constitute a beloved legacy for many Americans who memorize lyrics from “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” or “Fences” in school or remember him as a patriarchal public figure. Critics and fellow poets have underscored the complexity of these apparently effortless lines and their content, including glimpses of underlying terror which those quoting his familiar lyricism often overlook.
Industry:Culture
(1874 – 1978) Painter and illustrator. Rockwell’s mythic vision of America drew on and created images of a smalltown world of insightful and emotional interactions, but he could also extend this vision to encompass the human meanings of events as varied as homecomings and school integration. His work came into American homes through masscirculation magazines like Saturday Evening Post and Ladies’ Home Journal, for which he frequently created covers, leading many to dismiss it as popular kitsch. Recent critics have nonetheless reevaluated both the works and their iconic meanings.
Industry:Culture
(1878 – 1974) Poet of Swedish American heritage who celebrated the Midwest as an American heartland. Popular for his lyrical images of modern America and the common person, his critical reputation was more uneven. His poems were interwoven with his rural upbringing, life on the road and his years working with newspapers in Chicago, IL. He also won a Pulitzer Prize for his monumental biography of Abraham Lincoln (1926, 1939).
Industry:Culture
(1879 – 1955) Physicist whom Time magazine chose as “Man of the Millennium.” German-born Einstein was most famous for his theory of relativity and related re-conceptualizations of physics in the early twentieth century for which he received a Nobel Prize in 1921. When Hitler came into power, Einstein left for the United States, where he accepted a position at Princeton University He had pointed out the possibility of an atomic bomb in the late 1930s, but was not involved in the actual building of the bomb. Instead, he became known as both a pacifist (although not with regard to Hitler) and a Zionist, interests on which he continued to work and speak out until his death.
Industry:Culture
(1879 – 1966) Pioneer in birth control. Trained as a nurse, Sanger opened the world’s first birthcontrol clinic (in Brooklyn) in 1915; she also helped organize the Planned Parenthood movement. She fought in the courts for the right to disseminate information on birth control through the mail and films; her writings on the subject faced global bans. Later, she proved instrumental in supporting the development of an effective oral contraceptive (FDA approved in 1960).
Industry:Culture
