Pop Art

POP ART

What is Pop Art ?

The term Pop-Art was invented by British curator Lawrence Alloway in 1955, to describe a new form of "popular" art - a movement characterized by the imagery of consumerism and popular culture. Pop-Art emerged in both New York and London during the mid-1950's and became the dominant avant-garde style until the late 1960's. Characterised by bold, simple, everyday imagery, and vibrant block colours, it was interesting to look at and had a modern "hip" feel. The bright colour schemes also enabled this form of avant garde art to emaphasise certain elements in contemporary culture, and helped to narrow the divide between the commercial arts and the fine arts. It was the first post-modernist movement (where medium is as important as the message) as well as the first school of art to reflect the power of film and television, from which many of its most famous images acquired their celebrity. Common sources of Pop iconography were advertisements, consumer product packaging, photos of film stars, pop stars and other celebrities, and comic strips.

 Leading American Pop Artists:

In American art, famous exponents of pop included Robert Rauschenburg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Jim Dine and Roy Lichenstein.

Leading British Pop Artists:

Leading British Pop Artists included: Sir Peter Blake, Patrick Caulfield, Richard Hamilton, David Hockney and Allen Hones.

comparing the American pop art to the Britsh pop art will demonstrate different cultures and polital happenings in the 1960's. 

Origins and influeneces:

Pop Art, like nearly all significant art styles, was in part a reaction against the status quo. In 1950's America, the main style was Abstract Expressionism, an arcane non-figurative style of painting that - while admired by critics, serious art-lovers and experienced museum visitors - was not "connecting" with either the general public or with many artists. Very much a painterly style, the more abstract and expressive it became, the bigger the oppurtunity for a new style which employed more fugurative, more down to earth imagery: viz, something that the wider artist fraternity could get its teeth into and that viewers could relate to. Thus Pop art, which duly became the established art style, and which in turn was superceded by other schools after 1970.

 

In some ways, the emergence of Pop Art (and it's ascendary over abstract expressionism) was similar to the rise of Dada and it's broader based successor surrealism (and their ascendary over cubism). Both the superceded schools (abstract expressionism and cubism) involved highly intellectual styles with limited appeal to mainstream art lovers. True, Dada was essentially anti-art, but the years during which it flourished 1916-1922 were marked by great polarization and political strife, and as soon as things calmed down most Dadaists became surrealists. In any event, as explained under Aims and Philosophy, Pop-art shares many of the characteristics of Dada-surrealism and indebted to it for several techniques derived from Kurt Schwitters' collages, the "readymades" of Marcel Duchamp, the iconic imagery of Rene Margitte and the brash creations of Salvadori Dali e.g Mae West lips sofa, Lobster telephone.

 

 

And if surrealism was essentially internalist, and escapist in nature, while pop-art was defined by external consumerist forces, both were consumed by the need to make a strong visual impact on the general public.

Another artist who may have had an impact on pop-art is Edward Hopper the realist painter of urban America. Although his painterly style is very different from most pop works, his simple images of ultra-American everyday scenes (e.g "night hawkes" 1942 and "gas" 1940) were well known to the pop generation, and may have informed their paintings.

History:

British pop-art emerged from within the independent group - an informal circle of artists including painter Richard Hamilton, curator and art critic Lawrence Alloway, and sculptor Eduardo Palozzi, that met in the institute of Contemporary Arts in London.

From the first meeting, in 1952, when Palozzi presented a number of callages assembled from magazine clippings and other "found objects", including his (now) celebrated collage entitled "I was a rich man's plaything" (created 5 years previously in 1947) their discussions centred largley around the artistic value and relevance of popular mass culture.

Four years later, in 1956, another member of the group, Richard Hamilton, produced his own collage, "Just what is it that makes today's homes so appealing?" - which, along with Palozzi's 1947 collage, is regarded as one of the earliest examples of British Pop-Art. In 1961, a number of pop-art style works by Derek Boshier, David Hockney, Allen Jones, RB Kitaj and Peter Phillips, featured in the young contemporaries exhibition. In 1962, further publicity was given to british pop when the BBC screened "Pop goes the Easel", a film by Ken Russell which explored the new movement in Britain.

 

Research shows that Pop art has been influenced by a vast amount of of different artists and movements throughout the decades.

USA

Meanwhile in America, during the mid - 1950's, the art world was being rocked by a number of artists attatched to small movements (eg. Neo-Dada, Funk Art, Letterism, Beat Art, Polymaterialism, common-object to name but a few), many of whom were incorporating articles of mass culture in their works. They wanted their art to be much more inclusive than traditional styles ( like Abstract Expressionism), so they used non-art materials and focuse on ordinary, easily recognizable subjects that expressed the popular culture of the day.

Among this upsurge of innovation, work by Robert Rauschenburg, Ray Johnson and Jasper Johns was beginning to make an impact on the important New York art scene. Between them, they opened up a wholerange of new subject matter: Johns with his paintings of flags, targets and numbers, as well as his sculptures of objects like beer cans; Rauschenburg with his collage and assemblage art and "combine paintings" (in which a painted canvas in combined with various objects or photographic images such as: "Monogram" comprising a stuffed goat with a tyre around its middle) of stuffed animals, Coca Cola bottles, and other items; Johnson with his his celebrity collages of James Dean, Shirley Temple and Elvis. Other influential pioneers and advocates of pop-art were the composer John Cage ( an influential teacher at the Black Mountain College in Noth Carolina) and the performance artist Allan Kaprow.

 

The rising tide of new thinking was further enhanced by renewed interest in earlier avant-garde movements like Dada and Surrealism, whose enduring vitality was reinforced by the influence, if not the actual presence, of several ex Dadaists and Surrealists , like Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and local converts, such as Joseph Cornell. That said, it is important to state that while American avant-garde artists of this period (especially Rauschenburg) were indebted to earlier Europeans (like Duchamp, Schwitters et al) for establishing certain traditions (like collage), their unique focus was on producing art which reflected the reality of contemporary America.

By the early 1960's, a cohort of pop-style artists began to gain fame through solo exhibitions in places like New York and Los Angeles, several of whom used commercial printmaking techniques (eg. screen-printing) to create their art, rather than traditional painterly methods. These new talents included Jim Dine, Robert Indiana, Alex Katz, Roy Lichenstein, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Tom Wesselmann and Andy Warhol. Several works, later to become icons, were shown for the first time. They included Lichenstein's comic strip oils, Warhol's silkscreen prints of Marilyn Monroe and Campbell's soup cans and Oldenburg's monumental vinyl burgers and ice-creams.

 

Strangely, until late 1962 or early 1963, these artists were still labelled by critics as New Realists or some other such term. Thus teh two important art shows held in the autumn of 1962 - one curated by Walter Hopps at the Pasadena Art Museum, the other at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York - were entitled "The new painting of common objects" (Pasadena) and "New Realism" (New York). Only hereafter was the term pop-art used as a technical name for the movement, partly due to the presence in New York of Lawrence Alloway - nowa curator at the Guggenheim Museum - who advocated the adoption of the term.

From 1963 onwards, pop-art spread throughout America and helped by British pop-artists, established itself on the Continent. The movements rise was aided by parallel growth in other areas. In economics, via the growth of the world economy in general and the American economy in particular; in science, via the spread of television; in contemporary music, (which itself became known as "pop") through the miniaturization of radio, increased record production, the appearance of cult groups like The Beatles and the phenomenon of Phchedelia; and lastly through an expanding art market.

During the later 1960's, Andy Warhol emerged as the Damien Hirst of his day, gaining fame and noteriety in equal amounts for his iconic celebrity screenprints; his conceptualist film work, his increasingly sleek art production methods and his self promotion, at least until he was shot and seriously wounded on june 3 1968. Roy Lichenstein, too, became a household name through his comic-strip blow-up's and several prestigious retrospectives on both sides of the atlantic. Meantime, Rauschenburg won the Grand prize at the 1964 Venice Biennale, and maintained his avant-garde reputation by helping to form EAT (Experiments in Art and Technology) in 1966 to boost collaboration between artists and engineers, while Johns maintained his high standing by winning first prize at the 1967 Sao Paulo Biennale.

Perhaps Inevitably, having weathered the conformity of the 1950's, and the panic of the Cuban Missile Crisis 1962, American Pop-art reached it's peak during the second half of the 1960's, only to find itself infected and undermined by the angst of the Vietnam War Era, and the corresponding rise of anti-Americanism.

Britain:

Despite being less brash, less kitschy, more romantic and more nostalgic than its counterpart accross the Atlantic, British pop-art during the early and mid 1960's was strongly influenced by a US pop culture which it regarded as being more up-to-date and more exciting  than the home grown variety. It was during this period that Britain began importing a substantial amount of American life, such as burger bars and other fast food outlets. As a result, artists began to draw on American imagery for inspiration, although often with a very British slant. On the other hand the British advertising and printing industry was far less developed, which restrained British artists from using techniques already well established in New York(eg. silkscreen printing) and forced them to rely on older techniques.

Europe:

In Europe, The primacy of American popular culture was diluted by both language and politics. In Paris, still anxious about its junior status to New York as the World's top art centre, American pop culture was tolerated rather thank celebrated. Moreover, the French avant-garde - perhaps due to its  entrenched Communist Party - had a more political flavour and thus took a more Dadaist line encouraging audience participation in their preferred performance, Happenings and Conceptual art under the umbrella term of Noveau Realism. The leading French "Pop artists" or Nouveau Realistes were: Yves Klein, Francois Dufrene, Matial Raysse, Jaques de la Villegle, Jaques Monrory, Alain Jacquet and Jean Tinguely. Italy, being less political (despite an even larger Communist Party!) remained more open to the artistic and design possibilities inherent in pop-art. For instance, it was an Italian design group compromising Jonathan De Pas, Paolo Lomazzi and Donato d'Urbino that created "Joe Sofa" a sofa resembling a gigantic baseball mitt.

The Aims, Philosophy and Methods of Pop Art:

No International art movement that lasts for more than 15 years and encompasses all known art types, genres and types of media, as well as entirely new forums, can be summed up in a few sentances. Even so, no understanding of pop-art is possible without taking into account the following concepts which help to characterize its core.

Instant meaning:

The basic idea behind pop-art was to create a form of art with instant meaning. This was in sharp contrast to the super-intellectualism of Abstract Expressionism with its esoteric canvases so bloved my arts professionals. To achieve their goal of instant meaning, pop artists experimented with new commercial processes, like acylic painting, collage on canvas using materials not normally associated with painting, and silkscreen printing. In addition, the imagery and colour schemes for most pop art painting and sculpture was taken from high profile and easily recognizable consumerist or media sources such as: consumer goods, advertising graphics, magazines, television, film,cartoons and comic books. People and objects were presented in bright, often highly contrasting colours, while compositions were typically very simple and visually appealing to the general public.

Art can be made from anything:

Up until the 20th century, traditional fine art painting was normally done in oils: sculpture in bronze, stone or wood. furthermore, subjects were typically those deemed worthy of aesthetic treatment: the human nude, the human face, the classic landscape, genre-scene or still life. Even cubism, despite its revolutionary nature, tended to observe many of these artistic conventions. Then came the First World War and the anti-art movement known as Dada. This movement initiated the idea that art can be created from all sorts of stuff, including the most banal everyday scraps of material. pop-artists maintained and developed this idea. They presented the modern world of popular culture with whatever materials they thought appropriate, no matter how low-brow or trivial.

The idea is more important than the work itself:

Also, up until Dada, the essential feature of traditional fine art was the work itself - the painting, sculpture, etching, carving or whatever. Without a "work of art", there was nothing. All attention was therefore focused on the quality of the finished product, and the skills required to produce it. Dada rebelled against this by celebrating the "idea behind the artwork" rather than the work itself. Many pop-artists continued this tradition of conceptual art. They placed more importance on the impact of the work, and less importance on the making of it. Like the use of low-brow materials, this emphasis on a work's concept and impact was interpreted as an attempt to debunk the gravitas of the art world. This was partly true: some pop artists did share the anti-art and anti-aesthetic credo of earlier Dadaists. However, mainstream pop was more positive and more concerned to create new forms of expression, using new methods and new pictorial imagery, than to denigrate tradition. Indeed, many pop-artists saw themselves as contributing to, rather than junking, fine art.

Source: http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/history-of-art/pop-art.htm