Essay
Introduction
I have decided to look into
‘Pop Art’, which 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 began in the mid 1950s and reached its peak in the 1960s. I was a revolt against previaling orthodoxies in art and life and can be seen as one of the first manifestations of postmodernism. Sources pop artists used for their work included Hollywood movies, advertising, packaging, pop music and comic books. Modernist critics were horriefied by the pop artists' use of such low subject matter and by their apparently uncritical treatment of it. In fact pop both took art into new areas of subject matter and developed new ways of presenting in it art.
Chief artists in America were Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenberg, Andy Warhole; in Britain, Peter Black, Patrick Caulfield, Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, Allen Jones, Colin Self. In Europe a similar moment was called nouveau realisme (new realism)
Pop Art began in the mid 1950s and reached its peak in the 1960s. I was a revolt against previaling orthodoxies in art and life and can be seen as one of the first manifestations of postmodernism. Sources pop artists used for their work included Hollywood movies, advertising, packaging, pop music and comic books. Modernist critics were horriefied by the pop artists' use of such low subject matter and by their apparently uncritical treatment of it. In fact pop both took art into new areas of subject matter and developed new ways of presenting in it art.
Chief artists in America were Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenberg, Andy Warhole; in Britain, Peter Black, Patrick Caulfield, Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, Allen Jones, Colin Self. In Europe a similar moment was called nouveau realisme (new realism)
(Source - http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/p/pop-art) 27/05/2014
Pop art
employs aspects of mass culture, such as advertising, comic books and mundane
cultural objects. It is widely interpreted as a reaction to the then-dominant
ideas of abstract expressionism, as well as an expansion upon them. And due to
its utilization of found objects and images it is similar to Dada. Pop art is
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.
Pop art
and minimalism are considered to be art movements that precede postmodern art,
or are some of the earliest examples of Post-modern Art themselves.
Pop Art
Artists
There are a selection of inspirational Artists throughout the 1950s, many who had a big impact on the Pop Art movement. The most inspirational Artist is Andy Warhol, he was an a American Artist who was a leading figure in pop art. His work explore the relationship between artistic expression, celebrity culture and advertisement that flourished by the 1960s.
Roy Lichtenstein (October 27, 1923 – September 29, 1997) was a prominent American pop artist. During the 1960s, his paintings were exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City and along with Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist and others he became a leading figure in the new art movement. His work defined the basic premise of pop art better than any other through parody. Favouring the old-fashioned comic strip as subject matter, Lichtenstein produced hard-edged, precise compositions that documented while it parodied often in a tongue-in-cheek humorous manner. His work was heavily influenced by both popular advertising and the comic book style. He described Pop Art as, "not 'American' painting but actually industrial painting".
(Source - http://art-bydens.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/ten-famous-pop-art-artists.html)
19/05/2014
I personally feel that Roy
Lichtenstein was one of the most influential Artists around during the Pop Art
era, his work set the Art work to that certain time period.
During the 1950’s there
were many different and influential world events, many of them had effects on
the certain art period during the 10-year period. The first major one being is
the Korean War, I don’t think it had a major effect on Pop Art but it would have
influenced it in some way. Colour Television was introduced during 1951, On June 25, CBS broadcast the very first
commercial color TV program. Unfortunately, nearly no one could watch it on
their black-and-white televisions. Despite these early successes with color
programming, the adoption to color television was a slow one. It wasn't until
the 1960s that the public began buying color TVs in earnest and in the 1970s
the American public finally started purchasing more color TV sets than
black-and-white ones. However, sales of new black-and-white TV sets lingered on
even into the 1980s.
(Source - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_television) 20/05/2014
These two major events during the 1950s have influenced Pop Art in a great way, with the introduction of Colour TV designs could do a lot more with their work. The Korean war didn't have a great effects but i feel it still effected Pop Art style in one way or the other.
The reason I decided to choose
Pop Art is because I really like style, it has influenced my own work in
different ways. I really like the way that Pop Art shows advertising in a complete different way to other forms of advertising, i personally feel like it makes it more interesting. It would make people more interested in the certain advert because of the unique style and the eye catching design of advertising during pop art. The artwork is also very unique, they use very bright eye catching colours to make it stand out a lot compared to other art movements. Pop Art wasn't only in the 1950's in fact that was just the beginning, it continued into the 1960's also.
The movement was marked by a fascination with popular culture reflecting the affluence in post-war society. It was most prominent in American art but soon spread to Britain. In celebrating everyday objects such as soup cans, washing powder, comic strips and soda pop bottles, the movement turned the commonplace into icons.
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Pop Art is a direct descendant of Dadaism in the way it mocks the established art world by appropriating images from the street, the supermarket, the mass media, and presents it as art in itself.
Artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg took familiar objects such as flags and beer bottles as subjects for their paintings, while British artist Richard Hamilton used magazine imagery. The latter’s definition of Pop Art – “popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, and Big Business” – stressed its everyday, commonplace values.
It was Andy Warhol, however, who really brought Pop Art to the public eye. His screen prints of Coke bottles, Campbell’s soup tins and film stars are part of the iconography of the 20th century. Pop Art owed much to dada in the way it mocked the established art world. By embracing commercial techniques, and creating slick, machine-produced art, the Pop artists were setting themselves apart from the painterly, inward-looking tendencies of the Abstract Expressionist movement that immediately preceded them. The leading artists in Pop were Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Roy Hamilton, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Claes Oldenburg.
(Information taken from - http://www.artmovements.co.uk/popart.htm - Not in my own words, used for information) 02/06/2012
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