PLEASE FIND MY KEY RESEARCH FROM EACH POST HIGHLIGHTED IN YELLOW

In Conclusion

Swinging London was a youth-oriented phenomenon that emphasized the new and modern. It was a period of optimism and hedonism, and a cultural revolution. One catalyst was the recovery of the British economy after post-World War II austerity which lasted through much of the 1950s. Swinging London was inspirational to so many artists and photographers and my research displays this.

The Key findings from the research are that in main, Pop Art had it's own influences such as the Abstract Expressionism movement in the early 1900's and Dadaism later on, Andy Warhol and Jim Dine had their own influences from everyday objects and the economy in the 1960's which then later affected key photographers David Bailey and Terrence Donovan as they produced images of photographic clarity, often street scenes or portraits of famous peoplesimilar to photorealist art, creating a painting that appears to be very realistic like a photograph.

In conclusion, it is considered that photo realism grew out of the pop-art movement and minimalism movements that proceeded it. Like pop artists, the photo realists were interested in breaking down hierarchies of appropriate subject matter by including everyday scenes of commercial life - cars, shops and signage for example. Also like them, the photo realists drew from advertising and commercial imagery. David Bailey and Terence Donovan were both similar to photorealists and produced images that reflected the 1960's celebrity culture before anyone else.

Media Research

Watching films relating to the subject can give you insight into the cultural and social issues as the researchers for the films go into depth to provide factual happenings and events. 

Here are trailers for the films 'Blow Up' and 'Factory Girl', 'Blow up' relates to the life of david Bailey in the 1960's and 'Factory girl' is a more recent film based on the artwork and relationships of Andy Warhol.

BLOW UP (1966) 

Blow Up is a film based on the works and relationships of Photographer David Bailey.

"Watching "Blow-Up" once again, I took a few minutes to acclimate myself to the loopy psychedelic colors and the tendency of the hero to use words like "fab". Then I found the spell of the movie settling around me. Antonioni uses the materials of a suspense thriller without the payoff. He places them within a London of heartless fashion photography, groupies, bored rock audiences, languid pot parties, and a hero whose dead soul is roused briefly by a challenge to his craftsmanship.

The movie stars David Hemmings, who became a 1960s icon after this performance as Thomas, a hot young photographer with a Beatles haircut, a Rolls convertible and "birds" hammering on his studio door for a chance to pose and put out for him. The depths of his spiritual hunger are suggested in three brief scenes involving a neighbor (Sarah Miles), who lives with a painter across the way. He looks at her as if she alone could heal his soul (and may have once done so), but she's not available. He spends his days in tightly scheduled photo shoots (the model Verushka plays herself, and there's a group shoot involving grotesque mod fashions), and his nights visiting flophouses to take pictures that might provide a nice contrast in his book of fashion photography.

Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni's first English-language production was also his only box office hit, widely considered one of the seminal films of the 1960s. Thomas (David Hemmings) is a nihilistic, wealthy fashion photographer in mod "Swinging London." Filled with ennui, bored with his "fab" but oddly-lifeless existence of casual sex and drug use, Thomas comes alive when he wanders through a park, stops to take pictures of a couple embracing, and upon developing the images, believes that he has photographed a murder. Pursued by Jane (Vanessa Redgrave), the woman who is in the photos, Thomas pretends to give her the pictures, but in reality, he passes off a different roll of film to her. Thomas returns to the park and discovers that there is, indeed, a dead body lying in the shrubbery: the gray-haired man who was embracing Jane. Has she murdered him, or does Thomas' photo reveal a man with a gun hiding nearby? Antonioni's thriller is a puzzling, existential, adroitly-assembled masterpiece.
There were of course obvious reasons for the film's great initial success. It became notorious for the orgy scene involving the groupies; it was whispered that one could actually see pubic hair (this was only seven years after similar breathless rumors about Janet Leigh's breasts in "Psycho"). The decadent milieu was enormously attractive at the time. Parts of the film have flip-flopped in meaning. Much was made of the nudity in 1967, but the photographer's cruelty toward his models was not commented on; today, the sex seems tame, and what makes the audience gasp is the hero's contempt for women."

By Roger Ebert and Karl Williams

FACTORY GIRL (2006)

Factory Girl is an in depth look into Andy Warhol's method of work and relationships in the 1960's.

The true story of one woman's brief and ultimately tragic flirtation with fame in the 1960s provides the basis for this biographical drama. In 1943, Edie Sedgwick (Sienna Miller) was born to a wealthy and socially prominent family, and she grew up with beauty and money, but also a history of mental illness; she was hospitalized with an eating disorder in her late teens, and by the time she was 21, two of her seven siblings had died before their time. In 1964, Edie moved to New York City, and quickly made a splash on the Manhattan social scene; she became friendly with the famous pop artist Andy Warhol (Guy Pearce), who was fascinated by her gamine loveliness and her quirky personality. 

Warhol wasted no time in casting her in one of his underground movies, and she quickly became a crucial part of his retinue of "superstars." Fashion icon Diana Vreeland (Illeana Douglas) was convinced Edie had the looks and charm to also become a successful model, and soon she was gracing the pages of Life, Vogue, and Glamour. But Edie's instability was hardly helped by her new fast-lane lifestyle, and when she met Billy Quinn (Hayden Christensen), a folk rock singer-songwriter often cited as "the voice of a generation," he persuaded her that Warhol and his associates were simply using her fame and beauty for their own gain, and she found herself torn between two powerful mentors, one of whom had become her lover as well. Factory Girl also co-stars Jimmy Fallon, Mena Suvari, and Tara Summers as regulars at the Warhol "Factory." The character of Musician was inspired in part by Bob Dylan, who was romantically involved with Edie Sedgwick for a brief time.

By Mark Deming, Rovi AVG

Source: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19981108/REVIEWS08/401010304/1023 

Source: http://www.fandango.com/factorygirl_v342292/summary

Source: http://www.fandango.com/blowup_v60942/summary 

Andy Warhol

"Once you “got” Pop, you could never see a sign the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again." 

 Andy Warhol from Popism: The Warhol 60's.

Andy Warhol biography

Early Life

Andy Warhol was born Andrew Warhola on August 6, 1928, in a two-room row house apartment at 73 Orr Street in Pittsburgh. His parents, Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants Andrej and Julia Warhola, had three sons. Andy was their youngest.
Devout Byzantine Catholics, the family attended mass regularly and observed the traditions of their Eastern European heritage. Warhol’s father, a laborer, moved his family to a brick home on Dawson Street in 1934. Warhol attended the nearby Holmes School and took free art classes at Carnegie Institute (now The Carnegie Museum of Art). In addition to drawing, Hollywood movies enraptured Andy and he frequented the local cinema. When he was about nine years old, he received his first camera. Andy enjoyed taking pictures, and he developed them himself in his basement.
Andrej Warhola died in 1942, the same year that Andy entered Schenley High School. Recognizing his son’s talent, Andrej had saved money to pay for his college education. Warhol attended Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) from 1945 to 1949. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Pictorial Design with the goal of becoming a commercial illustrator. During these years he worked in the display department at Horne’s department store.

"I think of myself as an American artist; I like it here, I think it’s so great. It’s fantastic. I’d like to work in Europe but I wouldn’t do the same things, I’d do different things. I feel I represent the U.S. in my art but I’m not a social critic. I just paint those objects in my paintings because those are the things I know best."

Andy Warhol from 'My True Story'.

 

 

Success is a Job in New York – The 1950s

Soon after graduating, Warhol moved to New York City to pursue a career as a commercial artist. His work debuted in Glamour magazine in September 1949. Warhol became one of the most successful illustrators of the 1950s, winning numerous awards. He had a unique, whimsical style of drawing that belied its frequent sources: traced photographs and imagery. At times Warhol employed the delightfully quirky handwriting of his mother, who was always credited as “Andy Warhol’s Mother,” Julia Warhola left Pittsburgh in 1952 and lived with her son for almost 20 years before her death in Pittsburgh in 1972.
Warhol rewarded himself for his hard work by taking a round-the-world vacation with his friend Charles Lisanby from June 16 to August 12, 1956. They toured Hawaii and many countries in Asia and Europe. It was Warhol’s first trip abroad and a significant event in his life.
Serendipity 3, a trendy restaurant and ice cream parlor located on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, was a place where Warhol sometimes exhibited his work. He often held parties there--his friends could gorge themselves on the restaurant’s signature “frrrozen hot chocolate” while helping Warhol hand-color his self-published artists’ books.

Factory Years – The 1960s

In the late 1950s, Warhol began to devote more energy to painting. He made his first Pop paintings, which he based on comics and ads, in 1961. The following year marked the beginning of Warhol’s celebrity. He debuted his famous Campbell’s Soup Can series, which caused a sensation in the art world. Shortly thereafter he began a large sequence of movie star portraits, including Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, and Elizabeth Taylor. Warhol also started his series of “death and disaster” paintings at that time.

Between 1963 and 1968 Warhol worked with his Superstar performers and various other people to create hundreds of films. These films were scripted and improvised, ranging from conceptual experiments and simple narratives to short portraits and sexploitation features. His works include Empire (1964), The Chelsea Girls (1966), and the Screen Tests (1964-66).
Warhol’s first exhibition of sculptures was held in 1964. It included hundreds of replicas of large supermarket product boxes, including Brillo Boxes and Heinz Boxes. For this occasion, he premiered his new studio, painted silver and known as “The Factory”. It quickly became “the” place to be in New York; parties held there were mentioned in gossip columns throughout the country. Warhol held court at Max’s Kansas City, a nightclub that was a popular hangout among artists and celebrities. By the mid-1960s he was a frequent presence in magazines and the media.

Warhol expanded into the realm of performance art with a traveling multimedia show called The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which featured The Velvet Underground, a rock band. In 1966 Warhol exhibited Cow Wallpaper and Silver Clouds at the Leo Castelli Gallery.

Source: http://www.warhol.org/two_column_list.aspx?id=80&libID=101

Political Events 1960's

Prominent political events

United States

• 1960 - United States presidential eletion, 1960 - The key turning point of the campaign was the series of four Kennedy-Nixon debates; they were the first presidential debates held on television.
• 1961 – Newly elected President John F Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson take office in 1961; Kennedy establishes the Peace Corps.
• 1963 –  Martin Luther King Jr's " I Have a Dream" speech in Washington, D.C. on August 28.
• 1963 - President Lyndon Johnson becomes president and presses for civil rights legislation.
• 1964 – U.S President Lyndon B. Johnson is elected in his own right, defeating United States Senator Barry Goldwater in November.
• 1964 - Civil Rigths Act of 1964 signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson. This landmark piece of legislation in the United States outlawed racial segregation in schools, public places, and employment.
• 1964 - Wilderness Act signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on September 3.
• 1965 - U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson and Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey take office in January.
• 1965 - National Voting Rights Act of 1965 signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Outlawed discriminatory voting practices that had been responsible for the widespread disenfranchisement of African Americans in the United States.
• 1968 – U.S. President Richard M. Nixon is elected defeating Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey in November.
• 1969 – U.S. President Richard Nixon is inaugurated in January 1969; promises "peace with honor" to end the Vietnam War. 

Canada

• The Quiet Revolutin in Quebec altered the province into a more Secular Jean Lesage Liberal government created a welfare state (État-Providence) and fomented the rise of active nationalism among Francophone Québécois society.
• On February 15, 1965, the new maple leaf flag was adopted in Canada, after much acrimonious debate known as the Great flag debate.
• In 1960, the Canadian Bill of Rights becomes law, and Universal suffrage, the right for any Canadian citizen to vote, is finally adopted by John Diefenbaker's Progressive Conservative government. The new election act allows first nations people to vote for the first time.

Europe

• Construction of the Berlin Wall started in 1961.
• British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan delivers his Wind of change speech in 1960.
• Pope John XXIII calls the Second Vatican Council of the Catholic Church , continued by Pope Paul VI which met from October 11, 1962, until December 8, 1965.
• In October 1964, Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev was expelled from office due to his increasingly erratic and authoritarian behavior. Leonid Brezhnev Alexei Kosygin then became the new leaders of the Soviet Union.
• In Czechoslovakia 1968 was the year of Alexander Dubcek's Prague Spring, a source of inspiration to many Western leftists who admired Dubček's "socialism with a human face". The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August ended these hopes and also fatally damaged the chances of the orthodox communist parties drawing many recruits from the student protest movement.

China

• Relations with the United States remained hostile during the 1960s, although representatives from both countries held periodic meetings in Warsaw, Poland (since there was no US embassy in China). President Kennedy had plans to restore Sino-US relations, but his assassination, the war in Vietnam, and the Cultural Revolution put an end to that. Not until Richard Nixon took office in 1969 was there another opportunity.
• Following Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's expulsion in 1964, Sino-Soviet relations devolved into open hostility. The Chinese were deeply disturbed by the Soviet suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968, as the latter now claimed the right to intervene in any country it saw as deviating from the correct path of socialism. Finally, in March 1969, armed clashes took place along the Sino-Soviet border in Manchuria. This drove the Chinese to restore relations with the US, as Mao Zedong decided that the Soviet Union was a much greater threat.

Mexico

• The peak of the student and New Left protests in 1968 coincided with political upheavals in a number of other countries. Although these events often sprung from completely different causes, they were influenced by reports and images of what was happening in the United States and France.

Middle East

• On September 1, 1969, the Libyan monarchy was overthrown, and a radical, anti-Israel, anti-Western government headed by Col. Muammar al-Qadaffi took power.

South America

• In 1964, a successful coup against the democratically elected government of Brazilian president João Goulart, initiates a military dictatorship of over 20 years of oppression.
• The Argentine revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara travelled to Africa and then  Bolivia in his campaigning to spread worldwide revolution. He was captured and executed in 1967 by the Bolivian army, and afterwards became an iconic figure for leftists around the world.
• Juan Velasco Alvarado took power in Peru in 1968.

India

• In India a literary and cultural movement started in Calcutta, Patna, and other cities by a group of writers and painters who called themselves "Hungryalists", or members of the Hungry generation. The band of writers wanted to change virtually everything and were arrested with several cases filed against them on various charges. They ultimately won these cases. This span of the movement was from 1961 to 1965.

Source: www.wikipedia.com

TERENCE DONOVAN

Terence Donovan (1936-1996) came to prominence in London in the 1960s as part of a post-war renaissance in art, fashion, graphic design and photography. The energy of his fashion photographs and portraits, and the force of his personality, have assumed in the intervening years an almost folkloric significance. With David Bailey and Brian Duffy, photographers of a similar background and outlook, Donovan was perceived as a new force in British fashion photography. The three comprised a ‘Black Trinity’, according to Norman Parkinson, who found their methodology crude and their pictures at best ‘unpolished’. Donovan was 23 when he opened his studio, Bailey the same age when his first substantial commission came from Vogue. Their early success heralded the era of the ‘specialised hero’, which Vogue and magazines would reinforce – and mythologize – in print. Donovan’s accredited appearance in a star-studded Bailey fashion shoot, for QueenVogue in 1961, was an early signifier that photographers were now the equal to television stars, comedians and theatre actors. Later, on screen, Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow up (1966) would strengthen the notion of photographer-as-cultural-icon.

This video was directed by the Photographer Terrence Donovan, the clothing and make up was "inspired by Pop art and its bright contrasting colours."

Though they approached photography in distinct ways, the three – and others such as John Cowan – remain ciphers for a decade of ambition, energy and opportunism. Cecil Beaton, (like Parkinson, of the generation the three would eclipse) spoke, not entirely with approbation, of Donovan ‘creating such a stir!’ With hindsight, he went further: ‘Donovan’s young girls had no innocence and he somehow contrived to make them look as if they were wearing soiled underwear…’ The new democratic nature of photography and its discomforting effect, was boosted by Duffy’s triumphant assertion that ‘before us, fashion photographers were tall, thin and camp. We're different. We're short, fat and heterosexual’.

As early as 1962, Donovan and Bailey were hailed as ‘masters of the quick and vivid image’ but, to many observers and collectors, it has become clear with the passage of time that Donovan’s inventiveness continued into the following decades. He consolidated his success as a magazine photographer with a parallel career as a documentary filmmaker and with a body of self-motivated projects, such as idiosyncratic nude work and portraiture, landscape photography and, unexpectedly, the documentation of Judo. At the time, little of this reached a wide audience. However, he established himself as a maker of television commercials and pop videos, including that for Addicted to Love (1985) by Robert Palmer, considered to be one of the most influential and memorable videos ever made. In his later years, he developed a love of painting and exhibited vast abstract canvases inspired by Japanese calligraphy.

Donovan was born in East London on 14 September 1936, the son of Daniel Donovan, a lorry driver, and his wife Constance. His education was often disrupted, ‘I spent most of the war’, he once said, ‘in the cab of a large lorry travelling round England’, but he developed an interest in photography, which chimed with a golden age for black and white periodicals, notably Picture Post and Lilliput. Influenced by the documentary work of Bill Brandt, whose starkly black and white photo-essays appeared in both magazines, Donovan brought urban realism to his early magazine and advertising work. His backdrop was the blitzed and cratered landscape of his East End youth, observing that here was ‘a tough emptiness, a grittiness heightened by occasional pieces of rubbish rustling around in the wind.’ While his contemporaries Don McCullin and Roger Mayne found this urban landscape conducive to pure reportorial photography, Donovan brought this grittiness to the depiction of clothes.

This reached an early apogee in a series of men’s fashion pictures taken on the streets of London for Man About Town, published in 1961 and, for the same magazine a year later, a series of portraits en deshabille of the young actress Julie Christie in her London flat. The degree of informality brought to both was untypical of the time (and prompted Beaton’s disapproval). The sense of unobserved scrutiny in the Christie portfolio– the actress’ gaze rarely addressed the camera – appeared voyeuristic (a situation replicated later with the actress Sarah Miles). This approach was explored regularly in his magazine work and up until the 1990s remained a constant for magazines that sought a Donovan imprimatur.

Source: http://www.chrisbeetles.com/gallery/artist.php?art=1591

Jim Dine

 

Jim Dine was born June 16, 1935, in Cincinnati, Ohio. He studied at night at the Cincinnati Art Academy during his senior year of high school and then attended the University of Cincinnati, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Ohio University, Athens, from which he received his B.F.A. in 1957. Dine moved to New York in 1959 and soon became a pioneer creator of “Happenings”, together with Allan Kaprow, and Robert Whitman. He exhibited at the Judson Gallery, New York, in 1958 and 1959, and his first solo show took place at the Reuben Gallery, New York, in 1960.Dine is closely associated with the development of Pop art in the early 1960s. Frequently he affixed everyday objects, such as tools, rope, shoes, neckties, and other articles of clothing, and even a bathroom sink, to his canvases. Characteristically, these objects were Dine’s personal possessions. This autobiographical content was evident in Dine’s early Crash series of 1959–60 and appeared as well in subsequent recurrent themes and images, such as the Palettes, Hearts, and bathrobe Self-Portraits. Dine has also made a number of three-dimensional works and environments, and is well-known for his drawings and prints. He has written and illustrated several books of poetry.

 

In 1965, Dine was a guest lecturer at Yale University, New Haven, and artist-in-residence at Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio. He was a visiting artist at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, in 1967. From 1967 to 1971, he and his family lived in London. Dine has been given solo shows in museums in Europe and the United States. In 1970, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, organized a major retrospective of his work, and in 1978 the Museum of Modern Art, New York, presented a retrospective of his etchings. Dine lives in New York and Putney, Vermont.

 

Source: http://www.artnet.com/artists/jim-dine/