Why Did Patrick Nagel Follow The Pop Art Movement?

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be the front of a movement? Patrick Nagel created his own trend that was very similar to Lichtenstein’s pop art. Nagel was renowned for his neater, more refined take on Roy Lichtenstein’s pop art movement. Nagel’s artwork showed just how evolved art culture has become. Classical art always had the same bland take with few vibrant colors and the same subjects of still lifes, people exactly as they look, or landscapes. Nagel dared to follow the pop art movement and had no shading whatsoever and thick, bold lines with bright colors. Patrick Nagel also made a point without making it known that he was making a point. According to a biography I found that the reason he gave his models such a
He had women in almost every piece of artwork he created, which a lot of artists do, but Nagel’s women were more than your average girls. Each woman in his works were placed provocatively or nude save a few and he gave them each their own personas. The few that were not posed as such were portrayed with emotions based on their facial expressions. In 1976 Nagel started contributing regularly to Playboy, which extended the exposure and popularity of “The Nagel woman” (Patrick Nagel the Art History Archive-Contemporary Art, www.arthistoryarchive.com). Many people noticed his bold outreach for his art’s exposure. There seemed to be a forbidding sense due to his more seductive images which drew quite a few people to his work. Nagel’s art was very far from the classical styles with shading and realistic, soft features of the model. This made his artwork more appealing because the art world was still very used to classical art even though the pop-art movement had been around. His art reflected his personality quite well, he was a very uncensored person and he too conveyed many mixed emotions as his work did too. His explicit personality drew him to possibly the deal that would truly set his career off. The 80s hair band Duran Duran was looking for an album cover different from anything people had seen before. David Bowie reached out and eventually Nagel popped up with his work and the group loved
The “Nagel Woman” as it was called was actually meant to represent the women of the 80s who were bold and extravagant and didn’t care what the male gaze role played in their lives. Nagel wanted to express the evolved culture in the United States, it was a rapidly changing in many ways including the feminist movement and what a woman should be like according to society. Women like Cindi Lauper, Oprah Winfrey, and even Madonna were bold and influential women of the 1980s and were probably an inspiration to a great majority of people. Women were being liberated of the housewife role and they strayed very far from the careful fashion in place before. Women showed more skin and sported bright colors as a reflection of the kind of women they were. Nagel managed to capture all of this with his woman, she was free and unrestrained even when depicted in the nude, that’s a pretty hard thing to capture if you ask me. Patrick Nagel managed to paint an entire movement outside of art, the feminist movement. To have a famous artist be on your side during liberating times is pretty dang cool. “Nagel captured the independent woman of the early 1980s in his work, far from the soft images of women previously painted.” (www.wiscnews.com, Patrick Nagel’s paintings captured an era of