My brief summary of pop art: Pop art is an
art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in
Britain and in the late 1950s in the
United States.
Pop art presented a challenge to traditions of
fine art
by including imagery from popular culture such as advertising, news,
etc. In Pop art, material is sometimes visually removed from its known
context, isolated, and/or combined with unrelated material.
The concept of pop art refers not as much to the art itself as to the attitudes that led to it.
Pop art: A movement based on the imagery of consumerism
and popular culture, flourishing from the late 1950s to the early
1970s, chiefly in the USA and Britain. The term was coined
c. 1955 by the British critic Lawrence
Alloway
(‘I don't know precisely when it was first used', he later recalled,
but ‘sometime between the winter of 1954–5 and 1957 the phrase gained
currency in conversation'; the first appearance in print recorded in the
Oxford English Dictionary
is of September 1957). Initially Alloway used the term (and also the
expression ‘Pop culture') to refer to ‘the products of the mass media',
rather than to ‘works of art that draw upon popular culture', but by the
early 1960s the phrase was being used as a label for such art. Comic
books, advertisements, packaging, and images from television and the
cinema were all part of the iconography of the movement, and it was a
feature of Pop art in both the USA and Britain that it rejected any
distinction between good and bad taste: ‘there was some tension between
two aims: that of breaking down the distinction between high art and
popular culture and that of using elements of popular culture in order
to comment critically on modern society’ ( Jonathan Law, ed.,
European Culture: A Contemporary Companion, 1993).
In the USA Pop art was initially regarded as a reaction from
Abstract Expressionism because its exponents brought back figural imagery and made use of impersonal handling. It was seen as a descendant of
Dada (in fact Pop art is sometimes called
Neo-Dada)
because it debunked the seriousness of the art world and embraced the
use or reproduction of commonplace subjects (comic strips, soup tins,
highway signs) in a manner that had affinities with
Duchamp's ready-mades. The most immediate inspiration, however, was the work of Jasper
Johns and Robert
Rauschenberg,
both of whom began to make an impact on the New York art scene in the
mid-1950s. They opened a wide new range of subject-matter with Johns's
paintings of flags, targets, and numbers and his sculptures of objects
such as beer cans and Rauschenberg's
collages
and combine paintings with Coca-Cola bottles, stuffed birds, and
photographs from magazines and newspapers. While often using similar
subject-matter, Pop artists generally favoured commercial techniques in
preference to the painterly manner of Johns and Rauschenberg. Examples
are Andy
Warhol's silkscreens of soup-tins, heads of Marilyn Monroe, and so on, Roy
Lichtenstein's paintings in the manner of comic strips, Mel
Ramos's brash pin-ups, and James
Rosenquist's billboard-type pictures. Claes
Oldenburg, whose subjects include ice-cream cones and hamburgers, has been the major Pop art sculptor.
John Wilmerding (
American Art,
1976) writes that Pop art ‘cannot be separated from the culmination of
affluence and prosperity during the post-World-War-II era. America had
become a ravenously consuming society, packaging art as well as other
products, indulging in commercial manipulation, and celebrating
exhibitionism, self-promotion, and instant success … Pop's mass-media
orientation may further be related to the acceleration of uniformity in
most aspects of national life, whether restaurants or regional dialects.
Shared by all Americans were the principal preoccupations of Pop
art—sex, the automobile, and food. These became almost interchangeable,
as Americans increasingly blurred distinctions between bathroom,
highway, supermarket, and kitchen.’
In Britain, too, Pop art
revelled in a new glossy prosperity following years of post-war
austerity. British Pop was nurtured by the
Independent Group and the work that is often cited as the first fully-fledged Pop art image (though some of
Paolozzi's collages might also claim this title) was produced under its auspices— Richard
Hamilton's collage
Just What Is It that Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? ( Kunsthalle, Tübingen, 1956). However, British art first made a major impact at the
Young Contemporaries exhibition in 1961 (at about the same time that American art became a force). The artists in this exhibition included Derek
Boshier, David
Hockney, Allen
Jones, R. B.
Kitaj, and Peter
Phillips,
who had all been students at the Royal College of Art. In the same year
the BBC screened Ken Russell's film ‘Pop Goes the Easel', in which
Peter
Blake
was one of the featured artists. Other British exponents of Pop include
the sculptor Clive Barker (1940– ), whose works are sometimes
chromium-plated, the painter Gerald Laing (1936– ), best known for
pictures of cars, and the painter, printmaker, and sculptor Colin Self
(1941– ). Although there are exceptions (notably the erotic sculptures
of Allen Jones), British Pop was generally less brash than American,
expressing a more romantic view of the subject-matter in a way that can
now strike a note of nostalgia. However, much of the imagery in British
Pop came directly from the USA, expressing what Edward
Lucie-Smith
describes as ‘an uninhibited romantic hymn to a civilization half-real
and half-imagined, a wonderland of pin-ups and pinball machines'.
Richard Hamilton defined Pop art as ‘popular, transient, expendable,
low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, and
Big Business', and it was certainly a success on a material level,
getting through to the public in a way that few modern movements do and
attracting big-money collectors. However, it was scorned by many
critics. Harold
Rosenberg,
for example, described Pop as being ‘Like a joke without humour, told
over and over again until it begins to sound like a threat … Advertising
art which advertises itself as art that hates advertising.’
Although mainly associated with Britain and the USA, Pop art has also had adherents elsewhere, including Valerio
Adami in Italy and
Erró, an Icelandic artist working in Paris. There are links with other movements, too, such as
Nouveau Réalisme
in France. Some Pop artists have continued working with Pop imagery
long after the movement's heyday was over, Allen Jones in Britain
being a leading example.
IAN CHILVERS.
"Pop art."
A Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Art.
1999. Retrieved
June 06, 2012
from Encyclopedia.com:
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O5-Popart.html
Richard William Hamilton: (24 February 1922 – 13 September 2011) was a British painter and
collage artist. His 1956 collage,
Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?, produced for the
This Is Tomorrow exhibition of the
Independent Group in London, is considered by critics and historians to be one of the early works of
pop art.
.jpg){kind=spacer}
.jpg){kind=spacer}
