Modern Art Movement Concerned With Consumerism and Popular Culture

Ancestry of Pop Art

Neat Britain: The Independent Group

In 1952, a gathering of artists in London calling themselves the Independent Group began coming together regularly to hash out topics such equally mass civilization's identify in fine art, the found object, and science and applied science. Members included Eduardo Paolozzi, Richard Hamilton, architects Alison and Peter Smithson, and critics Lawrence Alloway and Reyner Banham. Britain in the early 1950s was still emerging from the austerity of the post-war years, and its citizens were ambivalent about American popular culture. While the group was suspicious of its commercial character, they were enthusiastic nigh the rich world popular civilization seemed to promise for the time to come. The imagery they discussed at length included that institute in Western movies, science fiction, comic books, billboards, automobile design, and rock and whorl music.

The actual term "Popular Art" has several possible origins: the offset employ of the term in writing has been attributed to both Lawrence Alloway and Alison and Peter Smithson, and alternately to Richard Hamilton, who defined Pop in a letter, while the get-go artwork to incorporate the give-and-take "Pop" was produced by Paolozzi. His collage I Was a Rich Man's Plaything (1947) contained cutting-up images of a pinup girl, Coca-Cola logo, ruby-red pie, World War Ii bomber, and a human's hand holding a pistol, out of which outburst the globe "POP!" in a puffy white cloud.

British Pop Art Movement Folio

New York City: The Emergence of Neo-Dada

Past the mid 1950s, the artists working in New York Urban center faced a critical juncture in modernistic art: follow the Abstruse Expressionists or rebel against the strict formalism advocated by many schools of modernism. By this time, Jasper Johns was already troubling conventions with abstract paintings that included references to: "things the mind already knows" - targets, flags, handprints, letters, and numbers. Meanwhile, Robert Rauschenberg's "combines" incorporated found objects and images, with more than traditional materials similar oil pigment. Similarly, Allan Kaprow's "Happenings" and the Fluxus movements chose to incorporate aspects from the surrounding world into their art. These artists, along with others, afterward became grouped in the movement known equally Neo-Dada. The at present archetype New York Pop Art of Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, and Andy Warhol emerged in the 1960 in the footsteps of the Neo-Dadaists.

Popular Art: Concepts, Styles, and Trends

Once the transition from the found-object constructions of the Neo-Dada artists to the Pop movement was complete, there was widespread interest on the part of artists in the incorporation of popular civilisation into their work. Although artists in the Independent Grouping in London initiated the use of "popular" in reference to art, American artists presently followed arrange and incorporated popular culture into their artwork likewise. Although the private styles vary widely, all of the artists maintain a commonality in their option of popular civilization imagery as their key subject. Shortly after American Popular Art arrived on the art globe scene, mainland European variants developed in the Capitalist Realist move in Germany and the Nouveau Réalisme movement in France.

Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi, and the Tabular Image

The Pop Art collages of Paolozzi and Hamilton convey the mixed feelings Europeans maintained toward American pop civilization; both exalting the mass-produced objects and images while also criticizing the excess. In his collage, Just what is it that makes today's homes and so unlike, so appealing? (1956), Hamilton combined images from various mass media sources, carefully selecting each image and composing the disparate elements of popular imagery into one coherent survey of post-war consumer culture. The members of the Independent Group were the first artists to present mass media imagery, acknowledging the challenges to traditional art categories occurring in America and Britain after 1945.

Roy Lichtenstein and Pulp Civilization

Lichtenstein proved that he could fulfill demands for a "smashing" limerick even though his subject matter derived from comic books. In addition to using the imagery from these mass-produced picture books, Lichtenstein appropriated the techniques used to create the images in comic books to create his paintings. He not only adopted the same bright colors and articulate outlines as pop art, his about innovative contribution was his employ of Ben-Twenty-four hours dots: small dots used to render color in mass-manufactured comics. Focusing on a single panel within a comic strip, Lichtenstein's canvases are not an exact facsimile, but are rather the artist's creative re-imaging of the limerick in which elements may have been added or eliminated, scale could shift, and text might be edited. By paw-painting the ordinarily machine-generated dots, and recreating comic volume scenes, Lichtenstein blurred the distinction between mass reproduction and high art.

James Rosenquist and the Monumental Image

Rosenquist as well straight appropriated images from popular civilisation for his paintings. However, rather than produce rote copies, Rosenquist exerted creative control through his surrealistic juxtapositions of products and celebrities, often inserting political messages. As part of his method, Rosenquist collaged magazine clippings from advertisements and photo spreads, and then used the results every bit studies for his final painting. Rosenquist's training in billboard painting transitioned perfectly into his realistic renderings of those collages expanded onto a monumental scale. With works often much larger and wider than xx feet, Rosenquist imbued the mundane with the same status previously reserved for high, sometimes royal, fine art subjects.

Andy Warhol and Repetition

Andy Warhol is most famous for his vividly colored portraits of celebrities, but his subject thing has varied widely throughout his career. The common theme amidst the different subjects is their inspiration in mass consumer culture. His earliest works describe objects similar Coca-Cola bottles and Campbell's soup cans, reproduced advertisement infinitum, every bit if the gallery wall were a shelf in a supermarket. Warhol transitioned from hand painting to screenprinting to further facilitate the big-scale replication of pop images. Warhol'due south insistence on mechanical reproduction rejected notions of creative authenticity and genius. Instead, he best-selling the commodification of art, proving that paintings were no different from cans of Campbell's soup; both have material worth and could be bought and sold like consumer appurtenances. He further equated the mass-produced condition of consumer goods with that of celebrities in portraits like Marilyn Diptych (1962).

Claes Oldenburg and Popular Sculpture

Renowned for his monumental public sculptures of everyday objects and his "soft" sculptures, Claes Oldenburg began his career on a much smaller scale. In 1961 he rented a storefront in New York City for a month where he installed and sold his wire and plaster sculptures of mundane objects, ranging from pastries to men'southward and women's undergarments, in an installation he dubbed The Shop. Oldenburg charged a nominal fee for each piece, which underscored his commentary on the role of fine art equally a commodity. He began his soft sculptures shortly after The Shop, constructing large, everyday objects, like a slice of block, an ice foam cone, or a mixer, out of fabric and stuffing so the end event collapses in on itself like a deflating balloon. Oldenburg would continue to focus on commonplace objects throughout his career, moving from soft sculptures to m public art, similar the 45-foot-high Clothespin (1974) in downtown Philadelphia. Regardless of the scale, Oldenburg's work always maintains a playful attitude toward re-creating mundane things in an unconventional manner in club to upend viewer's expectations.

Los Angeles Pop

As opposed to New York City, the art earth of Los Angeles was much less rigid, lacking the established galleries, critics, and hierarchies of the east coast; this openness is reflected in the styles of the artists who lived and worked at that place. The first museum survey of Pop Fine art, New Painting of Common Objects, was held at the Pasadena Fine art Museum in 1962, and showcased Warhol and Lichtenstein likewise every bit many artists living in Los Angeles including Ed Ruscha, Joe Goode, Phillip Hefferton, Wayne Thiebaud, and Robert Dowd. Other Los Angeles artists, like Billy Al Bengston, incorporated a dissimilar kind of aesthetic into their version of Pop, utilizing new materials such equally automobile paint and referencing surfing and motorcycles in works that make the familiar strange through new and unexpected combinations of images and media. By shifting the focus away from specific consumer goods, these artists immune Pop Fine art to move across replication to incorporate feel and evoke a particular feeling, attitude, or idea, while also pushing the boundaries between high fine art and pop culture.

Ed Ruscha and Signage

On the roster at Ferus Gallery, Ed Ruscha was 1 of the pivotal artists of Los Angeles Pop who worked in a diverseness of media, with the majority of these typically printed or painted. Emphasizing the omnipresence of signage in Los Angeles, Ruscha used words and phrases as subjects in his earliest Pop Fine art paintings. His first reference to popular culture was the painting Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights (1962), where he appropriated the twenty^th Century Play a joke on logo in a simplified composition with the hard edges and clear palette of a cartoon, echoing the similar billboards. His subsequent paintings of words farther blurred the lines betwixt advertising signage, painting, and abstraction, undermining the divisions between the artful globe and the commercial realm, some even incorporating three-dimensional objects similar pencils and comic books on the canvases. Ruscha's work presages the Conceptual art of the later 1960s, driven by the idea behind the artwork rather than the specific image. Ruscha'due south exploration of a diverseness of commonplace images and themes went beyond only reproducing them, just to examining the interchangeability of image, text, place, and experience.

Backer Realism in Deutschland

In Deutschland, the counterpart to the American Pop Art movement was Capitalist Realism, a movement that focused on subjects taken from commodity culture and utilized an aesthetic based in the mass media. The group was founded by Sigmar Polke in 1963 and included artists Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg as its central members. The Capitalist Realists sought to expose the consumerism and superficiality of gimmicky capitalist club by using the imagery and artful of popular art and advert inside their work. Polke explored the creative possibilities of mechanical reproduction and Lueg examined pop culture imagery, while Richter dissected the photographic medium.

Nouveau Réalisme in France

In France, aspects of Pop Art were present in Nouveau Réalisme, a movement launched by the critic Pierre Restany in 1960, with the drafting of the "Constitutive Declaration of New Realism," that proclaimed, "Nouveau Réalisme - new ways of perceiving the real." The declaration was signed in Yves Klein's workshop by nine artists who were united in their direct appropriation of mass culture, or in Restany's words, "poetic recycling of urban, industrial, and advertizing reality." This principle is evident in the work of Villeglé, whose technique of "décollage" involved cut through layers of posters to create a new paradigm. While the motion echoed the American Popular artists' concerns with commercial culture, many of the Nouveau Réalistes were more concerned with objects than with painting, every bit is the case with Spoerri, whose "snare-pictures" used nutrient, cutlery, and tabletops as artistic media. Other key proponents of the movement included Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, Arman, François Dufrêne, Raymond Hains, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Christo and Jean-Claude.

Afterward Developments - Afterwards Pop Art

Pop Art would continue to influence artists in later decades, with artists like Warhol maintaining a larger-than-life presence within the New York art world into the 1980s. Pop fell out of favor during the 1970s as the art world shifted focus from art objects to installations, performances, and other less tangible art forms. Withal, with the revival of painting at the stop of the 1970s and in the early 1980s, the art object came back into favor in one case once more, and popular culture provided subject matter that was like shooting fish in a barrel for viewers to identify and understand. One of the leading figures of the Neo-Pop movement was Jeff Koons, whose appropriation of pop culture icons such as Michael Jackson and mass-produced objects similar Hoover vacuum cleaners further pushed the boundaries of loftier art. In Japan, the work of Takashi Murakami has been cited as a more recent case of Neo-Pop, due to his utilize of popular anime imagery in his Superflat fashion and his successful partnering with fashion labels like Louis Vuitton. Such artists continue to break down the barrier between high and low art forms, while reevaluating the role of art as a commodity in and of itself.

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Source: https://www.theartstory.org/movement/pop-art/history-and-concepts/