U.S. painter, sculptor, and printmaker. Born in Augusta, Ga. in 1930, he began his career as a commercial artist, producing displays for New York shop windows. In 1958 he had his first one-man exhibition, a rousing success. With his friend R. Rauschenberg, he is considered largely responsible for the vogue for Pop art. His images depict commonplace two-dimensional objects (e.g., flags, maps, targets, numbers, letters of the alphabet) in simple colors. His banal subject matter and rejection of emotional expression departed radically from the Abstract Expressionism that then dominated the U.S. art scene. Among his best-known works is Painted Bronze (1960), a cast sculpture of two Ballantine Ale cans. From 1961 he began to attach real objects to his canvases. In the 1970s he produced paintings composed of clusters of parallel lines that he called “crosshatchings.” He is one of the most successful living artists.
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