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Pop Art (Beginning in 1956 in England, early
1960's USA)
Pop art is a visual art movement that emerged
in the mid 1950s in Britain and in parallel in the late 1950s in
the United States. The coinage of the term Pop Art is often
credited to British art critic/curator, Lawrence Alloway in an
essay titled The Arts and the Mass Media, but this is false -
the term that he uses is "popular mass culture"
Nevertheless, Alloway was one of the leading critics to defend
mass culture and Pop Art as a legitimate art form. Pop art is
one of the major art movements of the twentieth century.
Characterized by themes and techniques drawn from popular mass
culture, such as advertising and comic books, pop art is widely
interpreted as either a reaction to the then-dominant ideas of
abstract expressionism or an expansion upon them. Pop art, like
pop music, aimed to employ images of popular as opposed to
elitist culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy
elements of any given culture. Pop art at times targeted a broad
audience, and often claimed to do so.
Much of pop art is considered very academic, as the
unconventional organizational practices used often make it
difficult for some to comprehend. Pop art and minimalism are
considered to be the last modern art movements and thus the
precursors to postmodern art, or some of the earliest examples
of postmodern art themselves.
Origins
In that it marked a return to sharp paintwork and
representational art, pop art was a response to abstract
expressionism.] However, it 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.
Pop art in the USA
Temporally, the British pop art movement predated the American;
however, American pop art has its own origins separate from
British pop art. 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.
Pop art 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.
Pop art 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.
Pop Art (Beginning in 1956 in England,
early 1960's USA) -
Huntfor
Roy Lichtenstein: Visit our Studio Pop Art has started in
England in late 50's and grown in United States in early 60's.
Among the Pop Art forerunners are two unique models - prototypes
of the modern artists: the French artist Marcel Duchamp and the
German Kurt Schwitters. Duchamp's work and his thoughts have
altered the definition of the art and our way of understanding
it. He was famous with his "ready-mades," objects torn from
their usual contexts and exhibited as art. Kurt Schwitters
produced collages and assemblages that lay somewhere between
painting and sculpture. The work of his art turned into an
environment that was no longer something only to be looked at.
English art critic Lawrence Alloway used the term "Pop" first to
describe the art that made use of the objects, materials and
technologies from mass culture to bring out the yields of the
industrial society. It is often borrowed from advertising,
photography, comic strips and other mass media sources. Everyday
life is endless resource for the pop art … today is the core of
pop art.
Pop stresses frontal presentation and flatness of unmodulated
and unmixed color bound by hard edges. They suggest the
depersonalized processes of mass production. Pop Art
investigates in areas of popular taste and kitsch previously
considered outside the limits of fine art. It was rejecting the
attributes associated with art as an expression of personality.
Works were close enough to reality and at the same time it was
clear that they were no ready-mades but artificial re-creations
of real things.
Pop Art definitely broke the hegemony of the Abstract
Expressionism in Europe and United States that occupied center
art stage in 1950's-1960. It excreted the edges between high and
low art. It confronted institutional art with everyday endless
objects which gained, displayed as art, a new quality.
After the large-scale pop art exhibition at the Sidney Janis
Gallery in New York in 1962, Pop Art established itself as a
serious, recognized form of art. This exhibition becomes a
turning point for Pop Art. According to a series of critics, Pop
Art marked the end of modernism and the beginning of the
postmodern era. Although Pop is rather treated as an
entertainment, it had a profound impact on the art scene.
There are some differences between the Pop Art in England and
United States.
British Pop was the product of the Independent Group (IG),
formed in 1952 whose members resisted the institute's commitment
to modernist art, design, and architecture. They were
particularly intrigued by American automobile design, with its
emphasis on "planned obsolescence," the intentional production
of goods that would soon require replacement. British Pop
artists had optimistic point of view. They preferably dealt with
various forms of direct action - assemblages and happenings
rather than comics or AD. In Britain popular culture and
technology was just the subject of the popular art.
In America Pop artists reproduced, duplicated, combined,
overlaid and arranged the endless visual details that make up
American society, introducing shifts and transformations and
acting like commentaries. The most famous American Pop artist,
Andy Warhol specially had a lifelong interest in movie stars
which first surfaced in his art in 1962 when he begun working on
portraits of Marilyn Monroe. Warhole attempted to keep his
personal fascination with fame from showing through too clearly
in his works, preferring to leave their meaning open to the
interpretation of viewers. The Pop and media role was summarized
with Warhol's famous quotation:" In the future everybody will be
world famous for fifteen minutes". Television, newspapers,
magazines and Hollywood are just producing new images everyday.
They are only enlarging the popular culture. Everything is just
an image, ready to be consumed. The reality aura of art work is
death, the millions copies are the survival of it.
Main Representatives
* Forerunners of Pop: Marcel Duchamp
* Kurt Schwitters
* In Britain: Eduardo Paolozzi
* Peter Blake
* Richard Hamilton
* Allan Jones
* Tom Phillips
* In America: Roy Lichtenstein
* Andy Warhol
* Claes Oldenburg
* Jasper Johns
* Tom Wesselmann
* Robert Rauschenberg
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