1960s Pop Art, with its incorporation of images of mass culture, violated the traditional unspoken rules regarding what was appropriate subject matter for art. Andy Warhol (1928–87), the icon of pop art, achieved the kind of popularity usually reserved for rock stars. His soup cans, Brillo boxes, and images of movie stars were created with a factory-like silkscreen approach that he used to mock the art world. Roy Lichtenstein (1923–97), another pop artist, adopted the imagery of comic books and recreated them on such a large scale that the pattern of dots used to print them was made massive.
Robert Indiana (1928–2018) used stencils that had been originally used to produce commercial signs to create his own artistic messages.
Minimalism sought to reduce art to its barest essentials, emphasizing simplification of form and often featuring monochromatic palettes. The invention of acrylic paint and the airbrush enabled Minimalist painters to achieve very precise outlines, which resulted in the term “hard-edge painting.”
The artist who is best known for these large, entirely non-objective paintings is Frank Stella (b. 1936). The sculptors David Smith (1906–65), who used stainless steel, and Dan Flavin (1933–96), who used neon tubing, also created large pieces that reflected this abstract minimalist sensibility.
A Pop-inspired group of artists began to produce works that aimed to create a kind of super-realism or what came to be called Photorealism. In these works, a hyper-real quality results from the depiction of the subject matter in sharp focus, as in a photograph. This technique offered a clear contrast to the use of sfumato, developed in the Renaissance, which had added a haziness to the contour of painted objects. z
Photorealist artists Chuck Close (b. 1940), with his portraits, and Duane Hanson (1925–1996), with his witty sculptures of ordinary people, hearkened back to the Realism promoted by Gustave Courbet.
