POP ART (1950s – 1970s)

Pop Art was born in Britain during the mid 1950,s. It was the inspiration of a group of young rebellious artists - as most modern art tends to be. The first appearance of the term Pop Art occurred during discussions among artists who called themselves the Independent Group, which was part of the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, begun around 1952-53. Towards the late 1950s it started to emerge also in the United States of America.

The world of Pop Art tries to embrace what people want.  It welcomes popular culture or sometimes also referred to as “material culture”.  It doesn’t stand there and criticise the consequences of materialism and consumerism. It just simply recognises its persistent presence as a natural occurrence.  As a fact!

 

After the second world war, the youth of the time wanted to express their optimism after so much hardship and privation buy creating a youthful visual language. Colour was to be fundamental to all this.  A means of brighten up what was a very dull time in history. They turned to clever advertisements and building more on the effective means of mass communication.  Which at the time consisted of films, TV, newspapers and magazines.

Pop art on the other hand, presented a challenge to traditions of fine art.   In pop art,  recognisable material is sometimes visually removed from its known context, isolated, and/or combined with unrelated material.  However, what wasn’t very well understood by the previous generations was that the concept of pop art consisting much to the art itself, but more as to the attitudes that led to it and later on what it led.

Pop Art is commonly interpreted as a response to the then-dominant ideas of abstract expressionism.  Its use of objects and images have similarities to Dada. Pop art is aimed to employ images of popular as opposed to exclusive culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitsch elements of any given culture, most often through the use of irony.  It also made use of mechanical means of reproduction or rendering techniques of the time. Thus sometimes exaggerating the pixilation’s and dots.

Key Characteristics of Pop Art:

Familiar imagery, derived from popular media and products.

Flat imagery influenced by comic books and newspaper photographs.

Usually very bright colours.

Images of celebrities or fictional characters in comic books, advertisements and fan magazines.

Pop art frequently takes as its imagery that which is currently in use in advertising. Product labelling and logos figure prominently in the imagery chosen by pop artists, like in the Campbell's Soup Cans labels, by Andy Warhol. Warhol also took this concept also to the shipping box containing retail items like the Campbell’s Tomato Juice Box and also Brillo Soap box sculptures.

Pop art made its way to being associated with the work of New York artists of the early 1960s such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, and Claes Oldenburg, (all heavy weights to this art) but artists who drew on popular imagery were part of a world wide phenomenon in various cities from the mid 1950s onwards.

By following  in the footsteps and popularity of the Abstract Expressionists, Pop's reintroduction of recognisable imagery was a major shift for the direction of modernism. Pop artists celebrated everyday objects and people in subject of that point in time. This was it seeked to promote popular culture to the level of fine art. Perhaps owing to the incorporation of commercial images, Pop art has become one of the most recognizable styles of modern art.

Bibliography

ArtHistory.net. (2013-2014 Bitter Soup LLC). ArtHistory.net. Retrieved January 25, 2015, from http://arthistory.about.com/od/modernarthistory/a/Pop-Art-Art-History-101-Basics.htm

Foundation, J. W. (2015). Pop Art . Retrieved January 28, 2015, from The Art Story.org: http://www.theartstory.org/movement-pop-art.htm

Wikipedia, t. f. (2015, January 15). Pop Art. Retrieved January 2015, 25, from Wikimedia Foundation, Inc: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop_art