Sottsass transcended the sameness of typewriter design to give it an endearing personality. He tuned into Pop art, citing the orange nipples and pink breasts in Tom Wesselman’s nudes as inspiration for the orange scroll caps.
Photo still from A Clockwork Orange (1971) combining a Valentine and a Wesselman
TOM SACHS: But seriously, with Wesselmann you’ve got this perfect pop-abstract representation of the female figure. You’ve got near perfect primary colors, almost like Matisse; there’s something really cartoon about Wesselmann. He also turned up, in a way, in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), which people are rediscovering now on DVD. There’s a lot of art in that movie—even a Wesselmann-type painting. I think that movie represents pop art better than anything.
New Again: Tom Wesselmann - Interview Magazine by [[Tom Sachs]]
The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde
An excellent article exploring the origins of "Kawaii" (Japanese for "cute") style as manifested through modern artists in Japan such as Yoshitomo Nara and especially Takashi Murakami, whose aesthetic has won him high-profile collaborations with Kanye West (most notably the album cover of Graduation) and more recently Billie Eilish's video for "You should see me in a crown." The rising popularity of artists like Murakami, which dovetails with the ascendance of cutesy, non-threatening corporate design being discussed here illustrates how the patterns discussed in this article are both a product of and a reaction to a broader cultural trend of adult infantilization.
Wesley Gonzalez: Excellent Musician [oo]
VÖ: 30.6.2017
Pop was an ethos more than a movement, and it morphed as it migrated across borders and oceans. But nowhere was it more engaged than in Brazil, where artists opposed both American hegemony and their own country’s military regime.
In the mid-twentieth century, Brazilian pop artists protested military rule, American neocolonialism and political censorship through vivid, nationalistic works of art.