pop art

Pop art (1950s-1970s) was the first post-war art movement to embrace mass-media photographic imagery. Popular culture, consumer products, and photos of media stars provided the subject matter and the materials for artists who, no longer satisfied with abstract painting, were looking for a more playful and ironic strategy than the modernist insistence on heroic stances and deep spiritual references. Richard Hamilton's (b. 1922) $he (1958-61) was sourced from photographs found in American adverts, the epitome of desirability in post-war Britain. His Swingeing London 67 (1968-9), based on a newspaper photograph of the singer Mick Jagger and Hamilton's dealer Robert Fraser being arrested on drug charges, was produced using photomechanical processes in a variety of different versions. For Cosmetic Studies (1969), fragments of fashion photographs were collaged to make a single facial image. Robert Rauschenberg's (b. 1925) Combine Paintings of the 1950s and 1960s mixed painted surfaces with various objects, including photographs, in a practice alluding to Duchamp's use of ‘ready-mades’: everyday objects presented as art by being recontextualized in a gallery. Important shows for defining the movement were This is Tomorrow, organized by the Independent Group at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in 1956; and The New Realists, held at New York's Sidney Janis Gallery in 1962, which included works by Warhol. They articulated the claim that the hierarchy of high and low art was outmoded in a democratic society, and that the various arts should coexist as different but of equal value.

— Patrizia di Bello

Bibliography

• Walker, J., Art in the Age of Mass Media (1983)

Pop Art refers to the paintings, sculpture, assemblages, and collages of a small, yet influential, group of artists from the late 1950s to the late 1960s. Unlike abstract expressionism, pop art incorporated a wide range of media, imagery, and subject matter hitherto excluded from the realm of fine art. Pop artists cared little about creating unique art objects; they preferred to borrow their subject matter and techniques from the mass media, often transforming widely familiar photographs, icons, and styles into ironic visual artifacts. Such is the case in two of the most recognizable works of American pop art: Andy Warhol's Campbell Soup Can (1964), a gigantic silkscreen of the iconic red-and-white can, and Roy Lichtenstein's Whaam! (1963), one of his many paintings rendered in the style of a comic book image.

American pop art emerged from a number of converging interests both in the United States and abroad. As early as 1913, Marcel Duchamp introduced "ready made" objects into a fine-art context. Similarly Robert Rauschenberg's "combine-paintings" and Jasper John's flag paintings of the mid-1950s are frequently cited as examples of proto-pop. However, the term "pop art" originated in Britain, where it had reached print by 1957. In the strictest sense, pop art was born in a series of discussions at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts by the Independent Group, a loose coalition of artists and critics fascinated with postwar American popular culture. The 1956 "This Is Tomorrow" exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery introduced many of the conventions of pop art. Its most famous work, Richard Hamilton's collage Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? (1956), uses consumerist imagery from magazines, advertisements, and comic books to parody media representations of the American dream.

By the early 1960s, American pop artists were drawing upon many of the same sources as their British counterparts. Between 1960 and 1961, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Mel Ramos each produced a series of paintings based on comic book characters. James Rosenquist's early work juxtaposed billboard images in an attempt to reproduce the sensual overload characteristic of American culture. As the decade progressed, and a sense of group identity took hold, pop artists strove even further to challenge long-held beliefs within the art community. The work of such artists as Tom Wesselmann, Ed Ruscha, Claes Oldenburg, and Jim Dine introduced even greater levels of depersonalization, irony, even vulgarity, into American fine art.

Not surprisingly, older critics were often hostile toward pop art. Despite the social critique found in much pop art, it quickly found a home in many of America's premiere collections and galleries. Several pop artists willingly indulged the media's appetite for bright, attention-grabbing art. Andy Warhol's sales skyrocketed in the late-1960s as he churned out highly recognizable silk screens of celebrities and consumer products. By the decade's end, however, the movement itself was becoming obsolete. Although pop art was rapidly succeeded by other artistic trends, its emphasis on literalism, familiar imagery, and mechanical methods of production would have a tremendous influence on the art of the following three decades.

Bibliography

Alloway, Lawrence. American Pop Art. New York: Collier Books, 1974.

Crow, Thomas E. The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent 1955–1969. London: George Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1996.

Livingstone, Marco. Pop Art: A Continuing History. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000.

Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? (1956) is one of the earliest works to be considered pop art.

Pop art is a visual art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in parallel in the late 1950s in the United States. The coinage of the term Pop Art is often credited to British art critic/curator, Lawrence Alloway in an essay titled The Arts and the Mass Media, but this is false - the term that he uses is "popular mass culture" ^[1] Nevertheless, Alloway was one of the leading critics to defend mass culture and Pop Art as a legitimate art form. Pop art is one of the major art movements of the twentieth century. Characterized by themes and techniques drawn from popular mass culture, such as advertising and comic books, pop art is widely interpreted as either a reaction to the then-dominant ideas of abstract expressionism or an expansion upon them. Pop art, like pop music, aimed to employ images of popular as opposed to elitist culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any given culture. Pop art at times targeted a broad audience, and often claimed to do so.

Much of pop art is considered very academic, as the unconventional organizational practices used often make it difficult for some to comprehend. Pop art and minimalism are considered to be the last modern art movements and thus the precursors to postmodern art, or some of the earliest examples of postmodern art themselves.^[2]

Origins

In that it marked a return to sharp paintwork and representational art, pop art was a response to abstract expressionism.^[3] However, it also was a continuation of certain aspects of abstract expressionism, such as a belief in the possibilities for art, especially for large-scale artwork.^[3] Similarly, pop art was both an extension and a repudiation of Dadaism.^[3] While pop art and Dadaism explored some of the same subjects, pop art replaced the destructive, satirical, and anarchic impulses of the Dada movement with detached affirmation of the artifacts of mass culture.^[3]

Pop art in the USA

Drowning Girl (1963). On display at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Temporally, the British pop art movement predated the American; however, American pop art has its own origins separate from British pop art.^[3] During the 1920s American artists Gerald Murphy, Charles Demuth and Stuart Davis created paintings prefiguring the pop art movement that contained pop culture imagery such as mundane objects culled from American commercial products and advertising design.^[4][5][6]

Pop art in Spain

In Spain, the study of pop art is associated with the "new figurative." which arose from the roots of the crisis of informalism. Eduardo Arroyo could be said to fit within the pop art trend, on account of his interest in the environment, his critique of our media culture which incorporates icons of both mass media communication and the history of painting, and his scorn for nearly all established artistic styles. However, the Spaniard who could be considered the most authentically “pop” artist is Alfredo Alcaín, because of the use he makes of popular images and empty spaces in his compositions.

Also in the category of Spanish pop art is the “Chronicle Team” (El Equipo Crónica), which existed in Valencia between 1964 and 1981, formed by the artists Manolo Valdés and Rafael Solbes. Their movement can be characterized as pop because of its use of comics and publicity images and its simplification of images and photographic compositions.

Filmmaker Pedro Almodovar emerged from Madrid's "La Movida" subculture (1970s) making low budget super 8 pop art movies and was subsequently called the Andy Warhol of Spain by the media at the time. In the book "Almodovar on Almodovar" he is quoted saying that the 1950s film "Funny Face" is a central inspiration for his work. One pop trademark in Almodovar's films is that he always produces a fake commercial to be inserted into a scene.

Pop art in Japan

Pop art in Japan is unique and identifiable as Japanese because of the regular subjects and styles. Many Japanese pop artists take inspiration largely from anime, and sometimes ukiyo-e and traditional Japanese art. The best-known pop artist currently in Japan is Takashi Murakami, whose group of artists, Kaikai Kiki, is world-renowned for their own mass-produced but highly abstract and unique superflat art movement, a surrealist, post-modern movement whose inspiration comes mainly from anime and Japanese street culture, is mostly aimed at youth in Japan, and has made a large cultural impact. Some artists in Japan, like Yoshitomo Nara, are famous for their graffiti-inspired art, and some, such as Murakami, are famous for mass-produced plastic or polymer figurines. Many pop artists in Japan use surreal or obscene, shocking images in their art, taken from Japanese hentai. This element of the art catches the eye of viewers young and old, and is extremely thought-provoking, but is not taken as offensive in Japan. A common metaphor used in Japanese pop art is the innocence and vulnerability of children and youth. Artists like Nara and Aya Takano use children as a subject in almost all of their art. While Nara creates scenes of anger or rebellion through children, Takano communicates the innocence of children by portraying nude girls.

Paintings and Sculpture

Jasper Johns, 1954-1955 Flag	Andy Warhol, 1962 Campbell Soup Cans	Tom Wesselmann, 1962 Still Life	Wayne Thiebaud, 1963 Three Machines
Claes Oldenburg, 1966 Soft Bathtub	David Hockney, 1967 A Bigger Splash	Alex Katz, 1970 Vincent with Open Mouth	Jim Dine, 1984-1985 The Robe Following Her

Notable pop artists

Billy Apple Sir Peter Blake Derek Boshier Patrick Caulfield Alan D’Arcangelo Jim Dine Erró William Eggleston Marisol Escobar Alfred Gockel Red Grooms

Richard Hamilton Keith Haring David Hockney Robert Indiana Jasper Johns Allen Jones Alex Katz Corita Kent Nicholas Krushenick Yayoi Kusama Roy Lichtenstein Richard Lindner

Peter Max John McHale Takashi Murakami Claes Oldenburg Julian Opie Eduardo Paolozzi Peter Phillips Sigmar Polke Pietro Psaier Hariton Pushwagner Mel Ramos

Robert Rauschenberg Larry Rivers James Rizzi James Rosenquist Ed Ruscha George Segal Aya Takano Wayne Thiebaud Andy Warhol John Wesley Tom Wesselmann

See also

• Op art
• Plop art
• Lowbrow (art movement)
• Figuration Libre (art movement)

References

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