What Was the Pop Art Movement? What Is Pop Art

Beginnings of Popular Art

Not bad Britain: The Independent Grouping

In 1952, a gathering of artists in London calling themselves the Independent Group began meeting regularly to discuss topics such as mass culture's place in fine art, the found object, and scientific discipline and technology. Members included Eduardo Paolozzi, Richard Hamilton, architects Alison and Peter Smithson, and critics Lawrence Alloway and Reyner Banham. Britain in the early on 1950s was yet emerging from the thrift of the post-war years, and its citizens were ambivalent well-nigh American popular culture. While the group was suspicious of its commercial character, they were enthusiastic about the rich world pop civilisation seemed to promise for the futurity. The imagery they discussed at length included that establish in Western movies, scientific discipline fiction, comic books, billboards, auto pattern, and rock and coil music.

The actual term "Popular Art" has several possible origins: the showtime apply of the term in writing has been attributed to both Lawrence Alloway and Alison and Peter Smithson, and alternately to Richard Hamilton, who defined Popular in a letter, while the first artwork to incorporate the word "Pop" was produced past Paolozzi. His collage I Was a Rich Man's Plaything (1947) contained cut-up images of a pinup daughter, Coca-Cola logo, cherry pie, Globe War II bomber, and a human's hand holding a pistol, out of which burst the earth "POP!" in a puffy white cloud.

British Pop Fine art Movement Page

New York City: The Emergence of Neo-Dada

By the mid 1950s, the artists working in New York City faced a critical juncture in modern art: follow the Abstract Expressionists or rebel confronting the strict ceremonial advocated by many schools of modernism. By this time, Jasper Johns was already troubling conventions with abstract paintings that included references to: "things the listen already knows" - targets, flags, handprints, messages, and numbers. Meanwhile, Robert Rauschenberg'south "combines" incorporated establish objects and images, with more traditional materials like oil paint. Similarly, Allan Kaprow's "Happenings" and the Fluxus movements chose to incorporate aspects from the surrounding world into their fine art. These artists, along with others, later became grouped in the move known as Neo-Dada. The now classic New York Pop Art of Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, and Andy Warhol emerged in the 1960 in the footsteps of the Neo-Dadaists.

Popular Art: Concepts, Styles, and Trends

Once the transition from the establish-object constructions of the Neo-Dada artists to the Pop movement was complete, in that location was widespread interest on the role of artists in the incorporation of popular civilisation into their work. Although artists in the Independent Group in London initiated the use of "pop" in reference to fine art, American artists soon followed suit and incorporated pop culture into their artwork also. Although the individual styles vary widely, all of the artists maintain a commonality in their selection of popular culture imagery as their fundamental bailiwick. Shortly after American Popular Art arrived on the fine art globe scene, mainland European variants developed in the Capitalist Realist motility in Germany and the Nouveau Réalisme motility in French republic.

Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi, and the Tabular Image

The Pop Art collages of Paolozzi and Hamilton convey the mixed feelings Europeans maintained toward American popular culture; both exalting the mass-produced objects and images while also criticizing the backlog. In his collage, Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? (1956), Hamilton combined images from diverse mass media sources, carefully selecting each image and composing the disparate elements of popular imagery into one coherent survey of post-war consumer culture. The members of the Independent Grouping were the first artists to present mass media imagery, acknowledging the challenges to traditional art categories occurring in America and Britain afterward 1945.

Roy Lichtenstein and Lurid Culture

Lichtenstein proved that he could fulfill demands for a "great" composition even though his subject affair derived from comic books. In addition to using the imagery from these mass-produced picture books, Lichtenstein appropriated the techniques used to create the images in comic books to create his paintings. He not only adopted the same vivid colors and articulate outlines as popular fine art, his most innovative contribution was his employ of Ben-Day dots: small dots used to render color in mass-manufactured comics. Focusing on a single console inside a comic strip, Lichtenstein's canvases are not an exact facsimile, only are rather the creative person's creative re-imaging of the composition in which elements may accept been added or eliminated, scale could shift, and text might be edited. By hand-painting the usually car-generated dots, and recreating comic book scenes, Lichtenstein blurred the distinction betwixt mass reproduction and high art.

James Rosenquist and the Monumental Epitome

Rosenquist as well directly appropriated images from popular culture for his paintings. Notwithstanding, rather than produce rote copies, Rosenquist exerted artistic control through his surrealistic juxtapositions of products and celebrities, oftentimes inserting political messages. As function of his method, Rosenquist collaged mag clippings from advertisements and photo spreads, then used the results every bit studies for his final painting. Rosenquist'due south preparation in billboard painting transitioned perfectly into his realistic renderings of those collages expanded onto a monumental calibration. With works often much larger and wider than 20 feet, Rosenquist imbued the mundane with the aforementioned status previously reserved for loftier, sometimes royal, fine art subjects.

Andy Warhol and Repetition

Andy Warhol is most famous for his vividly colored portraits of celebrities, but his subject matter has varied widely throughout his career. The common theme among the different subjects is their inspiration in mass consumer culture. His earliest works depict objects similar Coca-Cola bottles and Campbell's soup cans, reproduced ad infinitum, equally if the gallery wall were a shelf in a supermarket. Warhol transitioned from mitt painting to screenprinting to further facilitate the big-scale replication of pop images. Warhol'southward insistence on mechanical reproduction rejected notions of creative authenticity and genius. Instead, he best-selling the commodification of art, proving that paintings were no different from cans of Campbell's soup; both take material worth and could exist bought and sold like consumer goods. He further equated the mass-produced status of consumer goods with that of celebrities in portraits similar Marilyn Diptych (1962).

Claes Oldenburg and Pop Sculpture

Renowned for his awe-inspiring public sculptures of everyday objects and his "soft" sculptures, Claes Oldenburg began his career on a much smaller scale. In 1961 he rented a storefront in New York Metropolis for a month where he installed and sold his wire and plaster sculptures of mundane objects, ranging from pastries to men'south and women'south undergarments, in an installation he dubbed The Store. Oldenburg charged a nominal fee for each slice, which underscored his commentary on the role of art as a commodity. He began his soft sculptures shortly afterward The Store, constructing large, everyday objects, like a slice of cake, an water ice cream cone, or a mixer, out of fabric and stuffing so the end upshot collapses in on itself like a deflating balloon. Oldenburg would continue to focus on commonplace objects throughout his career, moving from soft sculptures to grand public art, like the 45-foot-high Clothespin (1974) in downtown Philadelphia. Regardless of the scale, Oldenburg'southward work e'er maintains a playful attitude toward re-creating mundane things in an unconventional way in order to upend viewer'south expectations.

Los Angeles Popular

As opposed to New York City, the fine art world of Los Angeles was much less rigid, defective the established galleries, critics, and hierarchies of the east coast; this openness is reflected in the styles of the artists who lived and worked there. The first museum survey of Pop Art, New Painting of Mutual Objects, was held at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1962, and showcased Warhol and Lichtenstein also as many artists living in Los Angeles including Ed Ruscha, Joe Goode, Phillip Hefferton, Wayne Thiebaud, and Robert Dowd. Other Los Angeles artists, like Billy Al Bengston, incorporated a different kind of artful into their version of Pop, utilizing new materials such every bit automobile paint and referencing surfing and motorcycles in works that brand the familiar foreign through new and unexpected combinations of images and media. By shifting the focus abroad from specific consumer goods, these artists allowed Popular Art to motion beyond replication to incorporate experience and evoke a detail feeling, mental attitude, or idea, while also pushing the boundaries between high art and pop culture.

Ed Ruscha and Signage

On the roster at Ferus Gallery, Ed Ruscha was one of the pivotal artists of Los Angeles Pop who worked in a multifariousness of media, with the majority of these typically printed or painted. Emphasizing the omnipresence of signage in Los Angeles, Ruscha used words and phrases as subjects in his primeval Popular Fine art paintings. His kickoff reference to popular culture was the painting Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights (1962), where he appropriated the 20^thursday Century Fox logo in a simplified composition with the hard edges and articulate palette of a cartoon, echoing the like billboards. His subsequent paintings of words farther blurred the lines between advertising signage, painting, and abstraction, undermining the divisions between the aesthetic world and the commercial realm, some fifty-fifty incorporating three-dimensional objects like pencils and comic books on the canvases. Ruscha's piece of work presages the Conceptual fine art of the later on 1960s, driven past the idea behind the artwork rather than the specific image. Ruscha'southward exploration of a diverseness of commonplace images and themes went beyond merely reproducing them, only to examining the interchangeability of image, text, identify, and experience.

Capitalist Realism in Germany

In Germany, the counterpart to the American Pop Art movement was Capitalist Realism, a movement that focused on subjects taken from article civilization and utilized an aesthetic based in the mass media. The group was founded past Sigmar Polke in 1963 and included artists Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg as its fundamental members. The Capitalist Realists sought to betrayal the consumerism and superficiality of contemporary capitalist society past using the imagery and aesthetic of pop art and advertising within their work. Polke explored the artistic possibilities of mechanical reproduction and Lueg examined popular civilisation imagery, while Richter dissected the photographic medium.

Nouveau Réalisme in France

In France, aspects of Pop Art were present in Nouveau Réalisme, a motion launched by the critic Pierre Restany in 1960, with the drafting of the "Constitutive Declaration of New Realism," that proclaimed, "Nouveau Réalisme - new ways of perceiving the real." The announcement was signed in Yves Klein'south workshop past 9 artists who were united in their direct cribbing of mass civilisation, or in Restany's words, "poetic recycling of urban, industrial, and advert reality." This principle is evident in the work of Villeglé, whose technique of "décollage" involved cutting through layers of posters to create a new image. While the movement echoed the American Pop artists' concerns with commercial culture, many of the Nouveau Réalistes were more concerned with objects than with painting, as is the case with Spoerri, whose "snare-pictures" used food, cutlery, and tabletops as artistic media. Other key proponents of the movement included Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, Arman, François Dufrêne, Raymond Hains, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Christo and Jean-Claude.

Later Developments - After Popular Art

Popular Art would continue to influence artists in afterwards decades, with artists similar Warhol maintaining a larger-than-life presence inside the New York fine art world into the 1980s. Pop savage out of favor during the 1970s as the fine art world shifted focus from fine art objects to installations, performances, and other less tangible fine art forms. However, with the revival of painting at the cease of the 1970s and in the early 1980s, the art object came back into favor once again, and popular culture provided subject affair that was easy for viewers to identify and empathise. One of the leading figures of the Neo-Pop movement was Jeff Koons, whose appropriation of popular culture icons such as Michael Jackson and mass-produced objects like Hoover vacuum cleaners further pushed the boundaries of high art. In Japan, the piece of work of Takashi Murakami has been cited as a more recent instance of Neo-Pop, due to his use of popular anime imagery in his Superflat style and his successful partnering with fashion labels like Louis Vuitton. Such artists keep to pause down the barrier betwixt loftier and depression art forms, while reevaluating the role of fine art as a article in and of itself.

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Source: https://www.theartstory.org/movement/pop-art/history-and-concepts/