Pop art
Related: advertising - aestheticization of everyday life - camp - comics - consumerism - kitsch - mass society - mass media - modern art - playfulness - popular culture
Pop Art (2005) - David McCarthy
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]Related art movements: dada - Fluxus - surrealism
Artists: Keith Haring - Richard Hamilton - Roy Lichtenstein - Andy Warhol
Inspired: Memphis Design Group
Preceded by: abstract expressionism
Succeeded by: contemporary art
Definition
Pop art is an artistic movement that is a rejection of abstract expressionism and aims to return to figurative art while incorporating themes and techniques from mass culture. The term was coined in 1956 by British critic Lawrence Alloway.
Pop Art is also to some extent a satire of the philistine acquisitiveness of official art institutions – for example, early pop artists induced important museums to invest large sums of money in paintings of mundane subjects, done with acrylic paint on plywood, which quickly deteriorated. This movement gained strength in the 1960s and was centered in England and the United States early on.
Notable Pop Artists include Richard Hamilton, Keith Haring, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist and Andy Warhol.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop_art
"Just What is it that makes today's home so different, so appealing?" (1956) - Richard Hamilton
The term POP ART was first used by the English critic Lawrence Alloway in a 1958 issue of 'Architectural Digest' to describe paintings that celebrated post-war consumerism, defied the psychology of Abstract Expressionism, and worshipped the god of materialism and which incorporated images of mass media, advertising, comics and consumer products.
The 1950s were a period of optimism in Britain following the end of wartime rationing and a consumer boom was taking place. Influenced by the art seen in Eduardo Paolozzi's 1953 exhibition 'Parallel between Art and Life' at the Institute for Contemporary Arts, and by American artists such as Jasper John and Robert Rauschenberg, British artists like Richard Hamilton and the Independent Group aimed at broadening taste into more popular, less academic art. Hamilton helped organize the 'Man, Machine, and Motion' exhibition in 1955, and 'This is Tomorrow' with its landmark image "Just What is it that makes today's home so different, so appealing?" (1956).
Pop Art coincided with the youth and pop music phenomenon of the 1950s and '60s and became very much a part of the image of fashionable, 'swinging' London. Peter Blake, for example, designed album covers for Elvis Presley and the Beatles and placed film stars such as Brigitte Bardot in his pictures in the same way that Warhol was immortalizing Marilyn Monroe in the USA.
Pop art came in a number of waves, but all its adherents - Joe Tilson, Richard Smith, Peter Phillips, David Hockney and R.B. Kitaj - shared some interest in the urban, consumer, modern experience. Perhaps the greatest of all Pop artists was the cult figure Andy Warhol (1928-87), whose quasi-photographic paintings of people and everyday objects influenced not only a whole generation of other artists, but challenged our very perceptions of what is art. --http://www.popartportal.co.uk/history.htm [Aug 2004]
Everyday life [...]
It is a moot point as to whether the most extraordinary innovation of 20th-century art was Cubism or Pop Art. Both arose from a rebellion against an accepted style: the Cubists thought Post-Impressionist artists were too tame and limited, while Pop Artists thought the Abstract Expressionists pretentious and over-intense. Pop Art brought art back to the material realities of everyday life, to popular culture (hence ``pop''), in which ordinary people derived most of their visual pleasure from television, magazines, or comics.
Pop Art emerged in the mid 1950s in England, but realized its fullest potential in New York in the '60s where it shared, with Minimalism, the attentions of the art world. In Pop Art, the epic was replaced with the everyday and the mass-produced awarded the same significance as the unique; the gulf between ``high art'' and ``low art'' was eroding away. The media and advertising were favorite subjects for Pop Art's often witty celebrations of consumer society. Perhaps the greatest Pop artist, whose innovations have affected so much subsequent art, was the American artist, Andy Warhol (1928-87).
The term ``Pop Art'' was first used by the English critic Lawrence Alloway in a 1958 issue of Architectural Digest to describe those paintings that celebrate post-war consumerism, defy the psychology of Abstract Expressionism, and worship the god of materialism. The most famous of the Pop artists, the cult figure Andy Warhol, recreated quasi-photographic paintings of people or everyday objects. -- Nicolas Pioch in http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/tl/20th/pop-art.html [Aug 2004]
American Pop Art
Giant Soft Drum Set (1967) - Claes Oldenburg
Claes Oldenburg (born January 28, 1929) is a sculptor, best known for his public art installations typically featuring large versions of everyday objects. He has jokingly been called "the thinking man's Walt Disney". Another theme in his work is soft versions of normally hard objects. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claes_Oldenburg [Mar 2006]
Love (1964) - Robert Indiana
Indiana's best known image is the word "LOVE" in a square with a tilted "O". This image, first created for a Christmas card for the Museum of Modern Art in 1964, was included on an 8 cent United States Postal Service postage stamp in 1973, the first of their regular series of "love stamps." Sculpture versions are on display at: Sixth Avenue in New York City; the Indianapolis Museum of Art; Scottsdale's Civic Center and in so called LOVE Park in Philadelphia. He is also known for painting the unique basketball court formerly used by the Milwaukee Bucks in that city's U.S. Cellular Arena, with a large M shape taking up each half of the court.
Infamously, Indiana failed to register a copyright for the work, and found it difficult to deter unauthorized commercial use. The image has been reproduced in countless times in varying forms, including sculptures, posters, and 3-D desk ornaments. It has been translated into Hebrew, Chinese, and Spanish. It strongly influenced the original cover of Love Story, the Erich Segal novel. It was parodied on the Rage Against the Machine album cover for Renegades. Artist Mathew Jones created an AIDS-protest homage that read "DEAD". --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Indiana [Mar 2006]
See also: 1967 - 1964 - Pop Art - drums - love
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