When you think about the great centres of Pop Art around the world, Swindon isn’t usually at the forefront of your mind. New York perhaps, but Swindon, in the heart of Wiltshire? Not usually no, however this Tuesday Swindon will be home to an art auction featuring some of the leading art luminaries, such as David Hocney and Clive Barker.

Kidson-Trigg at Highworth are staging the art auction this week, where 300 works of art go under the hammer in a dispersal sale. The works are all 20th Century, containing modern art, contemporary art and traditional artwork. They are all currently owned by the Jarvis Hotel group.

The Hotel chain has many hotels in the Swindon area, and they’ve built up the collection of artwork over the last fifteen years. They’d purchased the art mainly from auction houses in London to decorate their range of hotels.

Pippa Kidson-Trigg is one of the auctioneers, and she states:

It is a genuine dispersal sale, everything has to sell, so pictures have inviting estimate prices, and we hope it will provide purchasers with the opportunity to enjoy and invest in affordable art amongst the infamous names of today’s Contemporary artists such as Gerald Laing, (one of the original wave of pop artists), Clive Barker (one of the leading British Pop artists) and Sir Terry Frost RA (One of Britains most succesful C20th artists).

Valerie Solanis doesn’t go down in history as one of those infamous people who changed history by assassinating someone famous. Instead she’s barely remembered by most as the woman who tried, and failed, to murder the Pop Artist Andy Warhol.

In 1969, on June 3rd, just days before Robert Kennedy was assassinated, Valerie Solanis shot Andy Warhol in his office in Manhattan, New York.

Solanis was familiar with Warhol had she’d actually appeared in one of the pop artist’s films. A victim of a tragic past where she was abused as a child, and the author of the book ‘SCUM Manifesto’ which was a tirade against the male species, Solanis believed that Andy Warhol possessed too much control over her own life.

She came to this decision after Andy Warhol had lost a play that she had written and sent to him.

Tragically Warhol didn’t survive long after the incident as it had affected him profoundly. He died in 1987 after telling many of his friends that he’d felt dead for a long time. Solanis served just three years in prison for the attempted murder, and died herself just 14 months after Andy Warhol in a hotel in San Francisco.

The jeans market has always been one of the most competitive throughout the last few decades, with brands going in and out of fashion. Although they’re seen as being very stylish, and some of the commercials have been labelled iconic moments, you’d never really associate jeans with art.

That may be about to change however as the brand Pepe Jeans are just about to step into the art world.

Pepe Jeans have put in a request to use the works of Pop-Art icon Andy Warhol in a range of their jeans, purely in Europe.

Warhol himself was famous for wearing Levi jeans, but the Warhol foundation actually cancelled a contract they had with Levi to produce jeans branded with the Warhol name. They have now agreed for Pepe Jeans to use the artist’s work in a collection that is to be on sale in August. The collection is simply called ‘The Art’.

There will be two different London collections, one focusing on signed contracts of Warhol’s and the other using his portraits.

Only the greatest icons of our time were immortalised by the Pop Art master Andy Warhol. Wayne Gretzky, Marilyn Monroe, a tin of soup… well, now one the most famous and influential men in the field of music and politics has been iconised on canvas. Bono, lead singer of Irish rock band U2 and one of the foremost speakers in the Make Poverty History campaign has been immortalised by Steve Kaufman, the US pop artist and prodigy of Andy Warhol.

Kaufman created a two panel work of U2’s Bono out of his studio in California, rather ingeniously titled ‘Bono 2 panel painting’. The work shows the Irish legend in portrait and profile, sporting his ever present trademark sunglasses.

Apparently Kaufman made the decision to paint Bono after a recent stay in Dublin where he participated in a pop art exhibition held by ‘Pop Art Ireland’. His work, which went on show in the Shelbourne Hotel, completely sold out.

The work is now on auction at the PopArtIreland.com website, which is expected to start at 7,000 Euros.

According to Andy Warhol the answer yes. His painting of the Campbell’s tomato soup tin has become an iconic image of the 1960’s.

Some critics say that Warhol’s work was fake, and some even suggest that he was a hoax. However, many others believe that there is much more to his work than meets the eye.

Warhol was not just painting a tin of soup. He was expressing through his artwork the huge wave of consumerism that had taken over society. The 1950’s and 1960’s saw the birth of branding. People were not buying the tin because it was tomato soup, but because it was Campbell’s.

His work, like the brands he drew, appealed to the masses, because everybody could relate to it; from the President, to a Hollywood star to Mr/Mrs Average. Warhol was passionate about popular culture and this is why he wanted to produce popular art (pop art).

In order to define his niche in art, he needed to define his subject matter. He painted the things he loved and things he had a passion for. He was quoted as saying that he ate Campbell’s soup for lunch everyday, clearly the motivation behind his painting then!

Robert Rauschenberg, an American pop artist and pioneer of his industry, died at the age of 82 this week.

Rauschenberg, who had been ill for some time, was described by the New York Times as a ‘Titan’ of art. He was born in 1925 in Texas.

Rauschenberg was a pioneer of an art style dubbed the ‘Combines’, which merges painting with sculpture. It wasn’t until the sixties that Rauschenberg moved into pop art, inspired as so many were by the works of Andy Warhol. Rauschenberg began using contemporary photography in his art with photos of public figures, including JFK.

As well as silkscreen painting (like Warhol) Rauschenberg also participated in performance art and set design.
One of Rauschenberg’s works was a painting created on his bed quilt using household items such as toothpaste. His reasoning for this was that he had an idea and didn’t have any canvas or paint to hand.
Rauschenberg even won a Grammy Award for the album cover for the Talking Heads work, Speaking in Tongues.

An Andy Warhol portrait of Mao Zedong looks set to become the artist’s most expensive work ever when it goes on sale at auctioneer’s Christies for $120 million.

The auctioneer’s are offering the painting as part of a private sale in Hong Kong, rather than through a public auction. They claim with the pending Olympics in Beijing, the time is perfect to sell a painting of this stature in the area.

It’s helped by the fact that the popularity of Andy Warhol has significantly increased in Asia recently.

Christies also hope the sale of the Warhol painting will help to build attention around art with a spate of major New York art auctions coming up. There have been fears of a slowdown in the art market.

It is hoped that some wealthy art dealers will bid on the work, which includes contemporary, modern and impressionist. Some experts are more pessimistic though predicting that much of the work will go unsold.

Art prices have fallen in the first quarter of 2008 by 7.5%, which has come as something of a shock after prices had risen constantly for the past several years.

Brett Gorvy is the deputy chairman at Christies:

If anything, the market has become more selective, so they’re chasing masterpieces.

The painting Christies are looking to sell for $120 million is of the former communist leader Mao Zedong, and stands at a staggering 14 foot tall.

Roy Lichtenstein is one of the most celebrated Pop Artists of our time. He was born in 1923 in New York and was privileged to be part of an upper-middle-class family.

Despite his talents in art it wasn’t until he graduated from high school that he attended his first art class, as his school didn’t offer art as a subject. He enrolled in the Art Students League of New York where he took Summer classes under Reginald Marsh. It was here that Lichtenstein learned his love of art, so much so that he left New York to study Fine Art at the State University of Ohio.

During his time at the University Lichtenstein was forced to take three years out to fight in the Second World War.

He then returned to Ohio State to finish his studies under the tutorship of Hoyt L. Sherman, who it is widely regarded, had a significant impact on Lichtenstein’s work. After graduation Lichtenstein stayed on at Ohio State to become a tutor, where he stayed for a further ten years.

When you think of Pop Art you probably think of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein or Peter Blake? They are the Western leaders in the Pop Art world.

What might not be as apparent is the Japanese movement in Pop Art.

Keiichi Tanaami was one of the earliest in the Japanese Pop Art movement, and he attended the Musashino art University. After graduation, and a brief flirtation with a design job, Tanaami went out on his own to experiment with animation, illustration and lithographs.

In the sixties Tanaami became exposed the Pop Art movement in the USA and met with Andy Warhol in New York. Inspired by Warhol’s silkscreen printing, Tanaami moved to America, and lived in San Francisco where his work become more colourful.

The ideas for his work stem from his dreams and his childhood memories, particularly the gruesome work he has created surrounding the torture he would inflict in goldfish. Tanaami was a particularly troublesome child when it came to inflicting unnecessary pain upon pets.

Today the search engine Giant Google went all Pop Art on us. They offered a series of skins for iGoogle, the customisable homepage that users can login to and add various RSS feeds and even access their email from.

The skins, which make the iGoogle homepage look like anything you want, were created for Google by the legendary Pop Artist Jeff Koons. Google commissioned Koons to create the artwork just for their iGoogle page.

Marissa Mayer, VP of search products and user experience for Google said:

Did you notice the chrome tulips on Google’s homepage today? They are part of a special Google doodle done by renowned artist Jeff Koons. And that isn’t the only art appearing anew on Google today. As part of our iGoogle Artists project, we have collaborated with almost 70 artists in 17 countries on 6 continents to create special iGoogle themes — works of art that appeal to all ages and interests.

One of the pieces of art from Jeff Koons featured a Pop Art work of Michael Jackson and his chimp Bubbles.

Koons is somewhat of a controversial figure in the Pop Art world, a 53 year old who married one of his models, a former porn star.

Koons was joined by many different artists who created work for Google to mark this day, and many of them weren’t even artists at all. Even the band Coldplay created a skin for iGoogle.