18 EDUCATION
school
TUESDAY OCTOBER 21 2014
work news
I
n the 1950s and ‘60s a movement of
modern art emerged that blurred the lines
between popular art and fine art. Dubbed
Pop Art by critics it was a bold, brash new
art form that used mass-produced,
popular images and images of commonplace
objects, raising them to the level of high art.
The images created by pop artists are some
of the best known works of modern art.
Series 14
Pop ar
with TROY LENNON
WHAT IS POP ART?
POP art emerged in the ’50s and was prevalent in modern art
up until the ‘70s. Some of its pioneers continued to work in a
style considered pop beyond that time but a post-pop form
of the art also emerged known as popism, which often took
pop art images and used them in a new way. Classic pop
art typically used common objects, mass media images and
mass-produced artforms. Images appropriated from
advertisements, cartoons and posters, or images of famous
faces or objects were portrayed in a context that emphasised
their abstract visual elements. Pop art celebrated popular
culture for its visual splendour, revelling in the ordinary but
removing it from its context so that it becomes a purely
visual thing and a comment on the easy mass production of
visual material.
FORERUNNERS
AVANTE-garde artists often choose interesting ways of going
against earlier trends in art. In the early 20th century artists
were exploring ways of shocking the art establishment, by
using unusual objects, subject matter or materials in their works
of art that went against the usual forms. Marcel Duchamp
pioneered a form of anti-art known as dada, which postured
itself as a rejection of all previous forms of art. Duchamp was
famous for his “ready-mades” or objects that he collected and
put together in unusual ways, presenting them as artworks.
Among them were a bicycle wheel stuck in a stool and a urinal
signed R.Mutt. It influenced how pop artists saw art. The use of
objects from the real world, or the depiction of ordinary objects
in refined artworks, was something cubists, dadaists and
surrealists had done for decades in collages.
THE FIRST POPSTERS
Pop developed first in England in the mid ‘50s, when artists in
the Independent Group at the Institute of Contemporary Arts
began producing works that incorporated popular culture
images from magazines, newspapers, comics and posters.
They were interested in the mass-produced images of the
modern world and believed, as artists interpreting the world,
they could not ignore popular art. Instead they sought to
remove the distinction between mass art and fine art. A similar
group emerged in the US in the late 1950s, also fascinated by
mass culture. The American pop artists were reacting to
abstract expressionism, coming back to representative art,and
yet, paradoxically, they were an extension of abstract
expressionism in that they often framed pop culture images in
such a way that emphasised their abstract design qualities.
POST-POP, POPISM
AND NEOPOP
WHILE the original pop art movement is considered to
have petered out in the 1970s there were many who
were inspired by the work of the great pop artists, using
images from popular culture in new ways. A movement
sometimes dubbed neopop or post pop rose in the ‘80s
and other artists have since taken up popism in their
own ways. Artists such as Australian Maria Kozic, who
was born in the 1950s when pop art was in its infancy,
grew up being influenced by the art form. Among her
works is her Masterpiece series, which includes a painting
of an image of Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup can that is
shattered like it was painted on glass (right) .
EDUARDO PAOLOZZI
BORN in Scotland in 1924, he studied at the Edinburgh
College of Art, Saint Martin’s School of Art in 1944,
and the Slade School of Fine Art. He spent time in Paris
where he came under the influence of artists such as
Fernand Leger and Georges Braque. He used a variety
of media and one of his earliest works, a 1947 collage
titled I Was A Rich Man’s Plaything, is considered a
predecessor of pop art. It used images from popular
culture (including a gun with the word “pop” exploding
from it) put together in a collage. However, at the
time Paolozzi was more interested in the surreal
juxtaposition of the elements. In 1952 he delivered a
lecture on the images of pop culture that influenced
many early British pop artists. He died in 2005.
RICHARD HAMILTO
BORN in 1922 in London, Hamilton studied
Academy. He was Influenced by the work
and also Eduardo Paolozzi and their use of
objects juxtaposed to create new artworks
Hamilton put together a collage titled Just
Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Ap
originally intended as a poster for the art s
Tomorrow, a 1956 exhibition of independe
Hamilton worked in a variety of media incl
and screen printing and on the cover of th
Album. One of his most famous works is a
based on a press photograph of Rolling Sto
Jagger and Robert Fraser (Hamilton’s art d
for drug offences, titled Swingeing London
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