Andy Warhol’s Subject Matter of the 1960s During the 1960s, Andy Warhol decided to experiment with pop art, a style of art that developed in England during the mid-1950s and produced realistic variations of well-known, everyday objects. He moved away from his technique of the blotted line and instead used canvas and paint. At first he had difficulty choosing what he was going to paint, but throughout the course of his pop art era he focused on four main subjects: product paintings, cartoon paintings, movie stars, and death. His first versions of pop art were called product paintings. These paintings showed popular consumer items that were familiar to the average American person, such as Brillo soap pads, Coca-Cola bottles, and the most famous of all, Campbell’s soup cans. He chose products such as these because they were top-selling products in the United States and they were considered important, useful, and economical by consumers. He drew his inspiration from the leftover Campbell’s soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles that he used at lunch. Andy Warhol’s second type of paintings was drawn from comic strips and comic books. Examples of these cartoon paintings include Dick Tracy (1961) and Superman (1960). Although he had begun to produce these before the product paintings, this phase lasted only a short period of time – once he discovered that Roy Lichtenstein was also painting characters from comic strips (seen in Castelli’s Gallery), he decided that he needed to find a different subject matter. After his attempts with American products and comic strips, Warhol began doing productions of Hollywood movie stars, the most well-known being those of Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, and Elizabeth Taylor. This was his first attempt at silk-screening, images in different colors that were all based on the same original portrait, because silk screens were cheaply mass