- This is about the art movement. For other uses see
Pop art .
Pop art is a visual art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in
Britain
and in the late 1950s in the United States
. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting
that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of
popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of
fine art. Pop removes the material from its context
and isolates the object, or combines it with other objects, for
contemplation. The concept of pop art refers not as much to the art
itself as to the attitudes that led to it.
Pop art is an art movement of the twentieth century. Characterized
by themes and techniques drawn from
popular mass culture, such as
advertising,
comic
books and mundane cultural objects, pop art is widely
interpreted as a reaction to the then-dominant ideas of
abstract expressionism, as well as an
expansion upon them. Pop art, aimed to employ images of popular as
opposed to elitist culture in art, emphasizing the banal or
kitschy elements of any given culture, most
often through the use of
irony. It is also
associated with the artists' use of mechanical means of
reproduction or rendering techniques.
Much of pop art is considered incongruent, as the conceptual
practices that are often used make it difficult for some to readily
comprehend. Pop art and
minimalism are
considered to be art movements that precede
postmodern art, or are some of the earliest
examples of Postmodern Art themselves.
Pop art often takes as its imagery that which is currently in use
in advertising. Product labeling and logos figure prominently in
the imagery chosen by pop artists. Consider the
Campbell's Soup Cans labels, by
Andy Warhol. Even the labeling on the
shipping carton containing retail items has been used as subject
matter in pop art. Consider
Warhol's
Campbell's Tomato Juice Box 1964, (pictured below), or his
Brillo Soap Box sculptures.
Origins
The origins of pop art in North America, China and Great Britain
developed slightly differently. In America, it marked a return to
hard-edged composition and
representational art as a
response by artists using impersonal, mundane reality,
irony and
parody to defuse the
personal symbolism and "painterly looseness" of
Abstract Expressionism. By contrast,
the origin in post-War Britain, while employing irony and parody,
was more academic with a focus on the dynamic and paradoxical
imagery of American popular culture as powerful, manipulative
symbolic devices that were affecting whole patterns of life, while
improving prosperity of a society. Early pop art in Britain was a
matter of ideas fueled by American popular culture viewed from
afar, while the American artists were inspired by the experiences
of living within that culture. However, pop art also was a
continuation of certain aspects of Abstract Expressionism, such as
a belief in the possibilities for art, especially for large-scale
artwork. Similarly, pop art was both an extension and a repudiation
of
Dadaism. 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. Among
those artists seen by some as producing work leading up to Pop art
are
Pablo Picasso,
Marcel Duchamp,
Kurt Schwitters, and
Man
Ray.
In Britain: The Independent Group
The
Independent Group (IG),
founded in London in 1952, is regarded as the precursor to the pop
art movement. They were a gathering of young painters, sculptors,
architects, writers and critics who were challenging prevailing
modernist approaches to culture as well as traditional views of
Fine Art. The group discussions centered around popular culture
implications from such elements as mass advertising, movies,
product design, comic strips, science fiction and technology. At
the first Independent Group meeting in 1952, co-founding member,
artist and sculptor
Eduardo
Paolozzi presented a lecture using a series of collages titled
Bunk! that he had assembled during his time Paris between
1947-1949. This material consisted of 'found objects' such as,
advertising, comic book characters, magazine covers and various
mass produced graphics that mostly represented American popular
culture. One of the images in that presentation was Paolozzi's 1947
collage,
I was a Rich Man's
Plaything, which includes the first use of the word “pop″,
appearing in a cloud of smoke emerging from a revolver. Following
Paolozzi's seminal presentation in 1952, the IG focused primarily
on the imagery of American popular culture, particularly mass
advertising.
Subsequent coinage of the complete term “pop art” was made by
John McHale for the ensuing
movement in 1954. “pop art” as a moniker was then used in
discussons by IG members in the Second Session of the IG in 1955,
and the specific term “pop art” first appeared in published print
in an article by IG members
Alison and Peter Smithson in Arc,
1956 .
However, the term is often credited to
British
art critic/curator,
Lawrence Alloway in a 1958 essay
titled The Arts and the Mass Media, although the term he
uses is "popular mass culture" Nevertheless, Alloway was one of the
leading critics to defend the inclusion of the imagery found in
mass culture in fine art.
In the United States
Although the movement began in the late 1950s, Pop Art in America
was given its greatest impetus during the 1960s. By this time,
American advertising had adopted many elements and inflections of
modern art and functioned at a very sophisticated level.
Consequently, American artists had to search deeper for dramatic
styles that would distance art from the well-designed and clever
commercial materials. As the British viewed American popular
culture imagery from a somewhat removed perspective, their views
were often instilled with romantic, sentimental and humorous
overtones. By contrast, American artists being bombarded daily with
the diversity of mass produced imagery, produced work that was
generally more bold and aggressive.
Two important painters in the establishment of America's pop art
vocabulary were
Jasper Johns and
Robert Rauschenberg. While the
paintings of Rauschenberg have relationships to the earlier work of
Kurt Schwitters and other Dadaists,
his concern was with social issues of the moment. His approach was
to create art out of ephemeral materials and using topical events
in the life of everyday America gave his work a unique quality.
Johns’ and Rauschenberg’s work of the 1950s is classified as
Neo-Dada, and is visually distinct from the
classic American Pop Art which began in the early 1960s.
Of equal importance to American pop art is
Roy Lichtenstein. His work probably defines
the basic premise of pop art better than any other through
parody. Selecting the old-fashioned comic strip as
subject matter, Lichtenstein produces a hard-edged, precise
composition that documents while it parodies in a soft manner. The
paintings of Lichtenstein, like those of
Andy Warhol,
Tom
Wesselmann and others, share a direct attachment to the
commonplace image of American popular culture, but also treat the
subject in an impersonal manner clearly illustrating the
idealization of mass production. Andy Warhol is probably the most
famous figure in Pop Art. Warhol attempted to take Pop beyond an
artistic style to a life style, and his work often displays a lack
of human affectation that dispenses with the irony and parody of
many of his peers.
It should also be noted that while the British pop art movement
predated the American pop art movement, there were some earlier
American proto-Pop origins which utilized 'as found' cultural
objects. 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.
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.
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.
In Italy
In Italy, Pop Art was known from 1964, and took place in different
forms, such as the "Scuola di Piazza del Popolo" in Rome, with
artists such as
Mario Schifano,
Franco Angeli,
Giosetta Fioroni,
Tano Festa and also some artworks by
Piero Manzoni and
Mimmo Rotella. During the Nineties,
NeoPop developed in Italy and Europe as a
contemporary remake of Pop Art.
Notable artists
See also
Notes and references
- Livingstone, M., Pop Art: A Continuing History, New
York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1990
- Livingstone, M., Pop Art: A Continuing History, New
York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1990
- de la Croix, H.; Tansey, R., Gardner's Art Through the
Ages, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1980.
- http://www.the-artists.org/movement/Pop_Art.html
- Gopnik, A.; Varnedoe, K., High & Low: Modern Art &
Popular Culture, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1990
- Arnason, H., History of Modern Art: Painting, Sculpture,
Architecture, New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 1968.
- Tate Collection image: I was a Rich Man's Plaything
[1]
- Alison and Peter Smithson, "But Today We Collect Ads" ,
reprinted on page 54 in Modern Dreams The Rise and Fall of
Pop, published by ICA and MIT, ISBN-N-O-262-73081-2
- Lawrence Alloway, "The Arts and the Mass Media," Architectural
Design & Construction, February 1958.
- Sandler,
Irving H. The New York School: The Painters and Sculptors
of the Fifties, New York: Harper & Row, 1978. ISBN
0-06-438505-1 pp.174-195, Rauschenberg and Johns; pp.
103-111, Rivers and other gestural realists;
- Robert Rosenblum, "Jasper Johns" Art International
(September 1960): 75.
- Hapgood, Susan & Berger, Maurice. Neo-Dada: redefining
art 1958-62. Scottsdale Center for the Arts 1994.
- Michelson, Annette, Buchloh, B. H. D. (eds) Andy
Warhol (October Files), MIT Press, 2001.
- Warhol, Andy. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, from A to B
and back again. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975
- Piper, David. The Illustrated History of Art, ISBN
0753701790, p486-487.
- New Yorker article, accessed online August 28,
2007
- Wayne Craven, American Art: History and Culture.
p.464.
- accessed online August 28, 2007
Further Reading
- Lucy R. Lippard, Pop Art, with contributions by Lawrence
Alloway, Nancy Marmer, Nicolas Calas, Frederick A. Praeger,
New York, 1966.
External links