Label
Label Copy for It’s All American: Pop and Photo-Realist Art from the Permanent Collection, May 20-July 26, 2014
Allan D’Arcangelo (1930-1998)
U.S. Highway #1, 1978
silkscreen
Collection of Mulvane Art Museum
Washburn University
Pop artist Allan D’Arcangelo is best known for his images of American highways, which he began painting in 1962. Highways, with their speeding cars, billboards and illuminated commercial signs seemed quintessentially American at a time when people were becoming more mobile and spending more time in their cars. In the early 1960s, D’Arcangelo created a series of works in which highways plunge into a distant perspective, as if they go on forever in the vast American landscape. By the middle of the 1960s, he began to focus on simplified, abstracted road signs and barriers as in this 1978 lithograph. Here directional arrows are combined with what appears to be the arm that lowers at a train crossing.
The extreme abstraction of this image allies it with other contemporary art styles, such as the hard-edged, geometric abstraction of artists like Ellsworth Kelly. Was D’Arcangelo emulating this high art, Modernist style, or was he mocking it by finding it in ordinary, unbeautiful American signs and symbols?