An art history blog

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"To many people, Roy Lichtenstein's paintings based on comic strips are synonymous with Pop Art. These depictions of characters in tense, dramatic situations are intended as ironic commentaries on modern man's plight, in which mass media — magazines, advertisements, and television — shapes everything, even our emotions. Lichtenstein also based paintings on well-known masterpieces of art, perhaps commenting, as did Andy Warhol in his "Mona Lisa," on the conversion of art into commodity. Like Warhol, Lichtenstein, who had an art-school background, also worked as a commercial artist and graphic designer (1951–57), an experience that influenced the subject matter of his later paintings. Lichtenstein's fame as a Pop artist began with his first one-man exhibition, at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in 1962, and continued to characterize his career throughout his life." (read more)

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"In 1908 Lewis Hine accepted a position as chief investigator and photographer for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), a private organization founded in 1904 to promote legislation to protect children from exploitation by American industry. Children as young as four years old labored in a variety of trades for up to twelve hours a day. During the sixteen years that Hine worked for the NCLC (often posing as an insurance inspector to gain access to the worksite), he made some five thousand photographs of children at work in mines, farms, canneries, sweatshops, and the street. Less troubling than many of Hine's pictures of child labor, this casual portrait of a trio of newspaper sellers, or newsies, shows the young boys awkwardly assuming the roles and mannerisms of manhood." (x)