Pop Art: Blog 9

Pop Art:

Pop Art was an artistic style of the popular culture. This movement showed positivity during the post-war period, where consumerism flourished. It happened together with pop music and they worked well together. Pop art was young and fun to the artistic movement. It included various styles of illustrations, paintings and sculptures in different countries. But the most common interest was the interest in mass production and mass media.

This movement aimed to remove the idea that art is associated with high standard cultures. They wanted to evoke that art is for everyone and that it can be influenced from any source. This idea was very influential at that time. Pop artist believed that everything is inter-connected. Most of them started their career in commercial art, like Andy Warhol, who was a Brilliant magazine illustrator and also a graphic designer. Ed Ruscha was also a graphic designer while James Rosenquist started as a billboard painter. Their experience in commercialism trained them to work for mass culture.

In the UK at around 1952, a group of artists started to discuss how they can incorporate art with mass culture. They were looking forward for this change. The most important topics they discussed were comic books, rock and roll music, and billboards. The first person to use the word POP in an artwork was Paolozzi. He created a collage with cut-outs of a pin up girl, Coca-cola logo, fighter plane and a pistol with the word POP bursting from it, in a white cloud.

In the United States, Pop art was developed from the reaction against the expressionists. The artists wanted to put art again in the real world, far from the abstraction that was being produced. The founders of American Pop art were Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Jasper John was influenced by DADA, especially by the iconography. His use of these icons made his work recognisable. His works represent balance between reality and abstraction. He was also influenced from the cubist’s collages.

Robert Rauschenberg’s images are usually combined with real objects and also painting. The work of these artists is often referred to Neo-Dada. Rauschenberg experimented quite a lot; he tries to capture life’s chaos. Moreover, an artist that is mostly known for Pop art is Andy Warhol. He focused on commercialism and mass production. He is mostly known for repetition in his art, the idea behind it is to show how mass culture works. The subjects vary from celebrities to soup cans, but his approach was always the same. Warhol did not agree that craftsmanship needs to express the artist’s personality. In fact, he worked to remove both craftsmanship and personality from his art works.

Pop art is also mainly associated with comic strips. Roy Lichtenstein created this style of black outlines, bold colours, and tones produced by red dots. Lichtenstein’s hard-edged style was an answer to the misunderstanding of that time’s abstraction in art. Pop art was also seen in Sculptures. Claes Oldenburg was a main figure in this art. He brought the flat art posters and comics to life with his sculptures. His idea was not functionalism, but it was art as it is seen with our eyes.

In conclusion, Pop art was and still is a strong style which influenced every type of art from music to fashion. This style is very fun to look at, and I really like it as it can be taken as a lifestyle not just an artistic style. One’s taste of music and fashion style can depict his or her character, and this is what a movement or style should be about, a complete lifestyle.

Bibliography

Anon., 2014. Arty Factory. [Online]
Available at: http://www.artyfactory.com/art_appreciation/art_movements/pop_art.htm
[Accessed 36 11 2014].

Wolf, J., 2013. The Art Story. [Online]
Available at: http://www.theartstory.org/movement-pop-art.htm
[Accessed 26 11 2014].