Pop art is a movement inspired by consumerist images and popular culture that flourished in the USA and Britain, from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. Characteristic techniques included silk-screen printing and collage. Pop art is based upon modern popular culture and the mass media, especially as a critic or ironic comment on traditional fine art values.
Incorporating techniques of commercial art into their art, Pop artists like Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol attempted to fuse elements of popular and high culture to erase the boundaries between the two. Pop Art borrowed ideas from comic books, advertisements, sign painting, packaging, television, magazines and films.
The term Pop Art is widely known nowadays, its artistic scope and the issues it raises are nonetheless frequently misunderstood. Unlike the abstract movement of the beginning of the 20th century, Pop artists refer to real objects. However, Pop artists are interested in the media coverage of the image of an object rather than in the object itself.
Pop Art began in Great Britain in the mid-1950s but American Pop Art has no explicit link with British Pop Art. It refers to a tendency that arose from individual initiatives. It was not a structured movement in the sense of a group putting on collective exhibitions, it does however have a certain coherence. American Pop Art emerged in the late 1950s, when American painting was characterized by two conflicting yet related movements. On the one hand, originality and independence from European influences were celebrated in Abstract Expressionism. On the other hand, an increasing number of artists had begun to question the validity of Abstract Expressionism as an avant-guarde artistic project.
Abstract Expressionism had a deep impact on contemporary art in general. Also known as Action painting, it started after World War II. The war and its horrors led artists to find a new way to express their angst : united against established practice and standards of aesthetic quality, painters like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko wanted to paint as if painting had never existed. They were directly influenced by Surrealism. During the war, many Surrealist poets and painters (André Breton, Max Ernst...) had fled to New York. New York painters were particularly fascinated by their automatism technique and the role of the unconscious. With psychoanalysis, what mattered was the act of painting as a moment of self-investigation rather than the finished work.
A radical departure from Abstract Expressionism occured with the philosopher and musicican John Cage. Fascinated by Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, Cage influenced his friends Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, who created a new form of realism known as Neo-Dada. While Abstract Expresionnism turned inwards, Cage turned outwards, looking for inspiration from life as the very material of art. He thought art did not have to express anything, least of all the artist’s self. Neo-Dada artists got recognition from the art community. Jasper Johns’ “clear and factual representation of commonplace subjects” led artists like Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol to chose similar subjects from mass media and popular culture, thus launching the Pop Art movement. Unlike Johns, however, Pop artists adopted an impersonal style.
In short, American Pop Art emerged from the work of Robert Rauschenberg and, chiefly, Jasper Johns, and is characterised by an interest in ordinary objects, irony, and a faith in the potency of images. American Pop Art has its home specifically in New York.
The term Pop Art was coined by the art critic Lawrence Alloway in the late 1950s, to indicate that art has a basis in the popular culture of its day and takes from it a faith in the power of images. But while Pop Art quotes from a culture specific to the consumer society, it does so in ironic mode. The British painter Richard Hamilton gave a definition of his artistic output : "Popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, and Big Business".
Andy Warhol’s paintings of Campbell’s soup cans, for instance, bear an industrial, mass-produced look in perfect adequacy with signs that advertised them at the time. Warhol’s attitude towards consumerism and sensationalism was highly ambiguous. He used repetition as a desensitizing process, replicating and altering images until their contents had lost all significance.
Pop Art was almost immediately successful with the public. Indeed, these were paintings that people could relate to instantly, as opposed to the intimidating Abstract Expressionism. The art establishment nevertheless considered Pop Art not art. After 1970, the artists turned to much more oppositional preoccupations.
Though the then popular culture inspired American artists, Pop Art and "Pop Culture" are not to be confused, even if they maintain a relationship. While Pop Art takes its materials from mass culture, mass culture in return profits from the former’s stylistic innovations.
Source :
http://www.centrepompidou.fr/education/ressources/ens-popart-en/ens-popart-en.htm
