Pop Art Charles Lapicque

"The French marine painter Charles Lapicque was born on October 6, 1898 in Theizé (Département Rhône). He spent his childhood in Epinal and visited Brittany (near Paimpol) for the first time in 1900, returning every summer for many years. He learned to play piano and violin. Beginning in 1909, Lapicque lived in Paris.
During the First World War, he fought in the artillery and received the "Croix de Guerre" in 1918. In the following year, he entered the École centrale des arts et manufactures academy in Paris and completed his training as an engineer here. However, he felt strongly drawn to art and dedicated himself to it on the weekends in particular. The artist painted his first landscape in the vicinity of Caen in 1920. Charles Lapicque continued to study as an autodidact in 1928. He turned to painting, printing techniques, and sculpture.

The artist’s first individual exhibition already took place in 1929 at the Gallery Jeanne Bucher. In addition to his main job as an engineer, the artist also visited museums and antique dealers and dedicated himself to illumination, tapestry, and enamel work. In 1935, Lapicque first met Gabriel Marcel (1889 – 1973) and, as a result, Jean Wahl (1888 – 1974). The acquaintance with the two philosophers formed the beginning of the philosophical and esthetic observations by the artist.
In 1937, he received the commission to create five large wall designs for the Palais de la Découvert in Paris. One of these ("La synthèse organique") won him the medal of honor from the 1937 Paris World Exhibition. In 1941, Lapicque participated in the group exhibition "Vingt jeunes peintres de tradition francais" by Jean Bazaine (1904 – 2001). This was the first event of painting from the modern age under the German occupation. Two years later, the artist visited Brittany again.
Charles Lapicque was only able to give up his job as an engineer through a contract with the Gallery Louis Carré in 1943. From that time on, he dedicated himself completely to art and created many works with the liberation of Paris as their theme. He also travelled to Brittany in 1945. The artist received the "Prix Raoul Dufy" of the Biennial of Venice in 1953. In the following years, Lapicque travelled to Venice four times and painted the villas, their gardens and inside furnishings, as well as the gables and facades of the churches.

In addition, he also went on trips to Rome (1957), Greece (1963), Spain (1973), Holland (1974), Vézelay (1975), the castles of the Loire (1976), and Aix-en-Provence (1979). In the treatise "Essais sur l’espace, l’art et la destinée", which was published in 1958, Lapicque formulated the theory of his artistic works. Between 1969 and 1972, he produced sculptures of metal and plastic, as well as tapestries and many engravings and lithographs. In 1979, the artist was awarded the "Grand prix national de peinture". Charles Lapicque died on July 15, 1988 in Orsay (near Paris)."(www.charles-lapicque.com )

Pop Art Marjorie Strider

Marjorie Virginia Strider (January 26, 1931 – August 27, 2014) was an American painter, sculptor and performance artist best known for her three-dimensional paintings and site-specific soft sculpture installations.
Born in 1931 in Guthrie, Oklahoma,[1] Strider studied art at the Kansas City Art Institute before moving to New York City in the early 1960s. Strider's three-dimensional paintings of beach girls with "built out" curves were prominently featured in the Pace Gallery's 1964 "International Girlie Show" alongside other "pin-up"-inspired Pop art by Rosalyn Drexler, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Tom Wesselman. Her comically pornographic Woman with Radish was made into the banner image for the show, one of the first successful exhibitions of the then-new gallery.Her bold figural work from this era aimed to subvert sexist images of women in popular culture by turning objectified female bodies into menacing forms that literally got "in your face." Strider had two subsequent solo exhibitions at the Pace Gallery in 1965 and 1966 where she continued to show her voluminous paintings of bikini-clad girls as well as 3-D renderings of vegetables, fruits, flowers, clouds and other natural phenomena.

 Strider became a core member of the 1960s avant-garde. She performed in Happenings organized by Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg and others. In 1969 she organized with Hannah Weiner and John Perreault the first Street Work, an informal public art event. Twenty artists participated including Vito Acconci, Gregory Battcock and Arakawa. Strider's contribution was thirty empty picture frames which she hung in random locations in Midtown Manhattan in the hopes of getting pedestrians to look at their environment differently. Strider married Michael Kirby, a contemporary artist and writer who published the first book on Happenings in 1965.

Around this time Strider made chocolate casts of Patty Oldenburg's breasts for Claes's birthday (a plaster version was later acquired by Sol LeWitt).Perhaps it was her intimate friendship with the Oldenburgs that led Strider to redirect her artistic focus from hard sculptural paintings to soft sculpture in the 1970s. She made site-specific installations of unbridled polyurethane foam that tumbled out of windows (Building Work 1976, PS1) or oozed down a spiral staircase (Blue Sky 1976, Clocktower Gallery).[6] At times her renegade pours incorporated domestic objects (brooms, groceries, teapots), while others remained totally amorphous. These works are similar in style and intent to Lynda Benglis' floor paintings and soft sculptures of the same era.

From 1982 to 1985, a retrospective of her work toured museums and universities across the United States. Venues included: SculptureCenter, New York; Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, South Carolina; Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska; Museum of Art, University of Arizona, Tucson; and the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas. In the 1990s, she began to make paintings with tactile surfaces that were more Abstract Expressionist than Pop. In 2009 she revisited her original girlie theme, painting new examples which she exhibited at the Bridge Gallery, New York.Wikipedia

Pop Art Lucjan Mianowski

"Painter, graphic designer and photographer whose works branched out between the styles of Expressionism and the Grotesque, Surrealism, Informel and pop art of the '50s and '60s. Based in Poznań and Kraków, traveling around the world for inspiration. Born on the 2nd of February, 1933, died in 2009 in Poznań.Lucjan Mianowski was was one of the most significant and fascinating of Polish graphic artists of the second half of the 20th century. He graduated with distinctions from the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts in 1956. He began exhibiting his works in Poland and was later recognised abroad. In 1957 he was awarded the first prize for a graphic in the Warsaw Arsenal Gallery, which at that time was presenting the Polish avant-garde. In 1959 he received scholarship of the French Government that enabled him studying at Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the lithography studio run by Professor Pierre Clairin, where he studied between 1959 and 1960 as well as 1963 and 1964. Between 1964 and 1965 he went to Scandinavia and then in 1967 to Algeria and France. His travels opened him up to the latest artistic developments all over the world and the growing influence of mass culture on the arts, becoming one of the first artists in Poland to experiment with pop-art. When he returned to Poland he was put in charge of the litho-graphic workshop at the Poznań State Academy of Fine Arts.

Mianowski first attracted attention by his work in which the symbolic sense of the colour dominates, such as the oil painting in shades of grey. There is a symbolic meaning to the colours he chose for his lithographs and graphic works. Continuously observing the world and people, he presented an ironic, albeit romantic, vision of the world. Nude in a mirror, for example, is still a search for some variant of technical means which can be used in a formal aspect: there is the effect of two cameras being used to make a simultaneous photograph from two opposite sides of the object, which gives a vision from both points of new together.
Mianowski once wrote, "To be independent in life; that’s impossible. To be independent in art; that’s my aim". He was always open to new directions and trends in art, always seeking a unique style within the broader context of a new wave in art that pop-art, graphics and photography introduced to the mainstream. During the last years of his life Mianowski exprimented with computer graphics, always looking towards new inspirations and technologies to channel his creativity.

 He painted his pictures slowly, taking weeks to add the finishing touches, returning to them time and again, improving and perfecting them. In an essay entitled Without the Lapses of Haste , written for an exhibition catalogue published by the Arsenał Municipal Gallery in Poznań, Zofia Starikiewicz wrote:
" Józef Drążkiewicz recalls when they were both at an open-air artists’ workshop in Finland in 1979 and he was able to observe how Mianowski’s works were born. Or, to tell the truth, a single work. They spent a month on the island of Iso-Pukki, near Turku, Finland’s ancient capital. At the beginning of their stay, Lucjan found a swimming float on the beach. It was the kind used to teach beginners, semi-circular and with a hole in it where a rope could be fed through. At around seventy centimetres, it was fairly large. And so, he began to prepare it for painting. He used a twig he had picked up in the forest to plug the hole, which, as he said, seemed to him to be coquetry. Then, for days upon end, he planed it and smoothed it with a razor blade. Then he primed it. And finally he painted a road to nowhere on it. The contours of the road ran in accordance with principles of linear perspective, but the perpendicular strip painted along the centre of the road ignored those same rules and led straight to the heavens. His meticulously detailed work on the swimming float took him the entire month. Then, once he was back in Poland, he looked at it again and stated that the arched, upper edge was also too coquettish. So he cut it away and began the work again from scratch."Lucjan Mianowski passed away on the 23rd of July 2009 in Poznan at the age of 76.
(Author: Agnieszka Le Nart www.culture.pl )