~POP ART~

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 Hamilton
Richard Hamilton, 1992
Born	24 February 1922 Pimlico, London, England
Died	13 September 2011 (aged 89)
Nationality	British
Field	Collage, painting, graphics
Training	Royal Academy Slade School of Art University College, London
Movement	Pop Art
Works	Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?

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.