Pop art  

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Seminal works in this tradition are Just What Is It that Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? by Richard Hamilton and Campbell's Soup Cans by Andy Warhol.






The origins of pop art in North America and Great Britain developed differently. In America, it marked a return to hard-edged composition and representational art as a response by artists using impersonal, mundane reality, irony and parody to defuse the personal symbolism and "painterly looseness" of Abstract Expressionism. By contrast, the origin in post-War Britain, while employing irony and parody, was more academic with a focus on the dynamic and paradoxical imagery of American popular culture as powerful, manipulative symbolic devices that were affecting whole patterns of life, while improving prosperity of a society. Early pop art in Britain was a matter of ideas fueled by American popular culture viewed from afar, while the American artists were inspired by the experiences of living within that culture. However, pop art 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. Among those artists seen by some as producing work leading up to Pop art are Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, and Man Ray.

In Britain: The Independent Group

The Independent Group (IG), founded in London in 1952, is regarded as the precursor to the pop art movement. They were a gathering of young painters, sculptors, architects, writers and critics who were challenging prevailing modernist approaches to culture as well as traditional views of Fine Art. The group discussions centered around popular culture implications from such elements as mass advertising, movies, product design, comic strips, science fiction and technology. At the first Independent Group meeting in 1952, co-founding member, artist and sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi presented a lecture using a series of collages titled Bunk! that he had assembled during his time Paris between 1947-1949. This material consisted of 'found objects' such as, advertising, comic book characters, magazine covers and various mass produced graphics that mostly represented American popular culture. One of the images in that presentation was Paolozzi's 1947 collage, I was a Rich Man's Plaything, which includes the first use of the word “pop″, appearing in a cloud of smoke emerging from a revolver. Following Paolozzi's seminal presentation in 1952, the IG focused primarily on the imagery of American popular culture, particularly mass advertising.

Subsequent coinage of the complete term “pop art” was made by John McHale for the ensuing movement in 1954. “pop art” as a moniker was then used in discussons by IG members in the Second Session of the IG in 1955, and the specific term “pop art” first appeared in published print in an article by IG members Alison and Peter Smithson in Arc, 1956 . However, the term is often credited to British art critic/curator, Lawrence Alloway in a 1958 essay titled The Arts and the Mass Media, although the term he uses is "popular mass culture" Nevertheless, Alloway was one of the leading critics to defend the inclusion of the imagery found in mass culture in fine art.

In the United States


Two important painters in the establishment of America's pop art vocabulary were Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. While the paintings of Rauschenberg (see Retroactive I) have relationships to the earlier work of Kurt Schwitters and other Dadaists, his concern was with social issues of the moment. His approach was to create art out of ephemeral materials and using topical events in the life of everyday America gave his work a unique quality. Johns’ and Rauschenberg’s work of the 1950s is classified as Neo-Dada, and is visually distinct from the classic American Pop Art which began in the early 1960s.


Early exhibitions

In the fall of 1962 New York art dealer Sidney Janis organized a groundbreaking exhibition, called The New Realists, an international survey of new to the scene contemporary American Pop artists and a related group of European artists associated with the art movement called New Realism. The Sidney Janis Gallery exhibition included Wayne Thiebaud, Richard Lindner, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Jim Dine, Robert Indiana, Tom Wesselmann, George Segal, Marisol, Jean Tinguely, Yves Klein, Arman, Mario Schifano, Enrico Baj, Mimmo Rotella, Christo, Martial Raysse, Öyvind Fahlström and several others.

Also in 1962 in Los Angeles Roy Lichtenstein's work was included, along with Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, Phillip Hefferton, Wayne Thiebaud, Joe Goode, Edward Ruscha, and Robert Dowd, in the historical New Painting of Common Objects, curated by Walter Hopps at the Pasadena Art Museum. This exhibition was the first Pop Art museum exhibition in America. These painters were part of a new movement, in a time of social unrest, which shocked America and the art world and changed art forever. This museum exhibition was followed by the Guggenheim Museum's 1963 pop art exhibition Six Painters and the Object, curated by Lawrence Alloway. Artists included in the Alloway exhibition were Jim Dine, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, and Andy Warhol.

Commercial galleries that first exhibited the Pop artists in the early to mid-1960s included the Green Gallery, the Stable Gallery, the Sidney Janis Gallery, the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York and the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles.


It should also be noted that while the British pop art movement predated the American pop art movement, there were some earlier American proto-Pop origins which utilized 'as found' cultural objects. 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.

In Spain



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.

In Italy


Italian Pop Art originated in ‘50s culture, to be precise in the works of two artists: Enrico Baj and Mimmo Rotella, who have every right to be considered the forerunners of this scene. In fact, it was around 1958-59 that Baj and Rotella abandoned their previous careers – which might be generically defined as a non-representational genre despite being run through with post-Dadaism – to catapult themselves into a new world of images and the reflections on them which was springing up all around them. Mimmo Rotella’s torn posters gained an ever more figurative taste, often explicitly and deliberately referring to the great icons of the times. Enrico Baj’s compositions were steeped in contemporary kitsch, which was to turn out to be a gold mine of images and stimuli for an entire generation of artists.


In music

Serge Gainsbourg is also considered to be one of the first music pop artists of the late 1960s. While artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein explored modern iconographic consumer culture through painting, Gainsbourg explored similar territory in music with songs such as "Comic Strip," "Ford Mustang," "Qui est In Qui est Out," and "Teenie Weenie Boppie."

See also

Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Pop art" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on original research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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