Coup D Oeil: Pop Art Analysis

The painting Coup d’Oeil, a French phrase meaning “Speed of Light,” was created by James Rosenquist. Rosenquist is a pop artist, creating many large, bright, and extravagant pieces. He is seen as a protagonist in the pop-art movement, alongside Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Similar to Warhol and Lichtenstein, Rosenquist uses bright colors in his pop art to create bold statements throughout all of his works. Coup d’Oeil was painted by Rosenquist using oils in 2001. The beauty of a painting with no clear images or forms is that it can be portrayed in a multitude of ways, all depending on what the viewer takes from it. With this painting’s use of bright colors, movement, and a contrast between order and messy, it creates an image than …show more content…
Common with the pop art theme, each color used in this painting is bold, fun, and different. Andy Warhol, the most renowned pop artist still popular today, used repetition of bright reds, pinks, blues, yellows, and white in his two most famous pieces: Campbell 's Soup Cans and Marilyn Diptych. These colors each stuck out individually in his pieces. The two pieces by Warhol were not oil paintings, which is what Rosenquist used to create Coup d’Oeil. Similar to Warhol, Rosenquist used the same color palette (among other colors) that Warhol used in his pieces and utilized repetition of those colors as well. The color pink is a strong color in this piece, similar to Marilyn Diptych, but in Rosenquist’s piece, each time the color pink is used it is formed in a different way. For example, on the top right side of this piece, the pink is in a straight line, but if you look closer the pink is also creating small circles, with a line going through it. This area is not just one solid color of pink. Looking closely, there are darker shades of pink and their is a tiniest bit of yellow within the pink. This yellow, and the darker shades of pink, is used to create movement and …show more content…
This effect allows the eye to move all over the painting, and feel like it is seeing new things over and over. With the use of this movement, the viewer has no “end point” in the painting, where they feel that they have seen enough of this painting. Instead, they are captivated, and drawn into the painting, intrigued to see more. This is something that you would not find in a photo or a painting of a person or an object. Once the viewer sees a photograph or a painting and quickly sees what is happening in the scene, the viewer understands what is happening and moves on, it is very easy to find the message when it is a visual scene you are familiar with. Since there is a lack of objects and people in Coup d’Oeil, the eye can not get enough of what the colors are doing and how they are moving. They are so captivated it is hard to look