- What is Pop Art?
- Characteristics of Pop Art
- Pop Art Background
- Featured Pop Art Artists
- Popular works of Pop Art
We explain what Pop Art is, its background, origin and characteristics. In addition, we tell you who are its featured artists and main works.
What is Pop Art?
Pop Art (“Pop Art” in Spanish) is an artistic movement that emerged in the mid-20th century (1950-1960) in Great Britain and the United States, and which constituted a response to the expressionism abstract that prevailed in the plastic arts of the time.
Inspired by mass culture and the imaginary of the consumption capitalist, Pop Art was characterized by its esthetic popular and commercial, which lay hands on the advertising, to the comic, to the cinema and the most everyday consumer objects. The spirit of this movement is summed up in Andy Warhol's famous work Campbell's soup cans , which consists of 32 canvases with painted soup cans, a very popular brand at the time.
It is important to understand that, contrary to what is often thought, Pop Art did not consist of a facile artistic movement, in which everything could be done because everything qualified as art. On the contrary, it was a clearly political movement, which constituted a mirror in which the consumer society post-war period: everything was produced in series, packaged and ready to be consumed, in a massive and vertiginous way, but at the same time repetitive, standardized, anonymizing.
Pop Art is not a popular art, that is, it is not an art that claims the customs, folklore or the traditional point of view of the people.Its name has to do with the category of "pop", that is, what becomes fashionable in the consumer society, what appears on the covers of magazines and in advertising. This name was first used to describe the movement in 1956 in the magazine Arc, but its invention is credited to John McHale.
The slogan of Pop Art, borrowed from the famous French artist Marcel Duchamp, was that "the art It had to be, above all, intelligent”: it had to invite the viewer to a critical reflection on the society and the culture.
Pop Art had a great international success and soon had important repercussions in Germany, Spain, Italy, Japan and other countries. It is considered a very representative movement of modern art and a precursor to postmodern art.
Characteristics of Pop Art
Pop Art is characterized by the following:
- It was a movement contrary to abstract expressionism, which sought the reunification of life and art through the "cooling" of the emotions, that is, distancing the viewer from the work so that he can think about it. Furthermore, he moved away from the surrealist heritage and embraced the Dada tradition instead.
- His look at the artistic object wanted to reflect the superficiality and anonymity of the consumer society and mass culture. Therefore, the subjectivity of the artist was set aside: it was hidden from the viewer of the work.
- His main sources of material were advertising, comics and magazines, graphic design and film. In addition to taking them as material, Pop Art also ventured into the paint, the sculpture, the collage, film and graphic design.
- In his works abound colors intense, serial forms or portraits of celebrities, and repetitive formats.These works are not always consistent with each other, since they use very different techniques and methods, but always starting from the same artistic attitude.
- The insignificance, daily life and the banal were some of his key concepts, although approached from a critical point of view, inviting the viewer to reflect on society, art and culture.
Pop Art Background
I was a Rich Man's Plaything by Eduardo Paolozzi is considered the first work of Pop Art.
Pop Art is an heir to aesthetics Dadaistan art movement nihilistic of the 1920s, whose central axis was the ridicule of pompous Parisian art. This movement arose after the cultural impact of the First World War, in which the values traditions of the West began to shake under the weight of the horrors of the war; This allows us to suppose that Pop Art had a similar origin in the period after the Second World War.
Among the great precursors of Pop Art are names such as Marcel Duchamp, famous for his urinal turned into a work of art for an exhibition; or the Dadaists and surrealists Man Ray and Max Ernst; or the Dadaist sculptor Jean Arp. Also fundamental was the work of Yves Klein, who experimented with monotony and aesthetic undifferentiation, as well as the experiences with the collage of cubism.
However, the most direct predecessor of Pop Art in the United Kingdom was the Independent Group, founded in London in 1952, which brought together many painters, sculptors, writers and art critics who wanted to oppose the prevailing modernist trend in British arts at the time. In fact, the work I was a Rich Man's Plaything ("I was a rich man's toy") by Eduardo Paolozzi, co-founder of the group, is properly considered the first work of Pop Art.
Featured Pop Art Artists
Among the main names associated with Pop Art are the following:
- Andrew Warhol (1928-1987). Of American origin, this plastic artist and actor is probably the most representative of the authors of Pop Art. His world-renowned works serve as an emblem of the movement, especially his serigraphs and serial reproductions of objects, photographs of celebrities and politicians (Marilyn Monroe, Mao Tse Tung, Che Guevara, etc.). In addition, he is credited with the famous phrase: "In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes", which somehow sums up the spirit of Pop Art and the time. His work consists of paintings, films, literary writings and musical pieces.
- Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997). Born in the United States to a Jewish family, Lichtenstein dabbled with great success in painting and sculpture. His most famous works incorporate the comic language and cartoon aesthetics of the moment, employing in his creation industrial colors (generally primary) and Ben-Day dots.
- Keith Haring (1958-1990). American artist and social activist, his work is iconic of the generation of 1980. He dabbled in both music and painting as well as sculpture, with the aim of breaking down the barriers between these three genres. His images were simple, accessible to the general public and above all generic, serialized, typical of industrial design or logo design. One of the most famous and representative sculptures of him is the Red Dog installed in Ulm, Germany.
- Tom Wesselman (1931-2004). American painter and one of the last great masters of Pop Art, he produced impressive works, among which his daring female nudes stand out. He experimented with lithography, screen printing, and aquatint, as well as sculpture, using cut plates.
Popular works of Pop Art
Some of the most representative works of Pop Art are the following:
Campbell's soup cans by Andy Warhol. Marilyn Diptych by Andy Warhol. Blam! by Roy Lichtenstein. In the car by Roy Lichtenstein. The great american nude by Tom Wesselmann.