MODERNIST STYLE :
Key structural traits of
the style
POP
Pop art is aimed to employ images of popular as opposed to elitist culture in
art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any given culture, most often
through the use of irony. It is also associated with the artists' use of
mechanical means of reproduction or rendering techniques.
CONTEXT/ TIME &
PLACE OF ART
MOVEMENT:
Include:
political climate,
social issues,
global issues,
cultural influence,
technology available
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid-1950s in Britain and in the
late 1950s predominately in the United States.
Although Pop Art began in the late 1950s, Pop Art in America was given its
greatest impetus during the 1960s. The term "Pop Art" was officially introduced
in December 1962. By this time, American advertising had adopted many
elements and inflections of modern art and functioned at a very sophisticated
level. Consequently, American artists had to search deeper for dramatic styles
that would distance art from the well-designed and clever commercial
materials.
During this time in America it was an age of consumerism e.g. goods seen in
homes, advertising e.g. billboards and tv and an age of celebrities as seen on tv.
KEY CONCEPTS OR
IDEAS BEHIND THE
STYLE:
Pop art presented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including imagery
from popular culture such as advertising, news, etc. In pop art, material is
sometimes visually removed from its known context, isolated, and/or
combined with unrelated material e.g. soup cans. The concept of pop art refers
not as much to the art itself as to the attitudes that led to it.
Pop art employs aspects of mass culture, such as advertising, comic books and
mundane cultural objects. It is widely interpreted as a reaction to the thendominant ideas of abstract expressionism, as well as an expansion upon them.
And due to its utilization of found objects and images it is similar to Dada.
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Recognizable imagery, drawn from popular media and products.
Usually very bright colours.
Flat imagery influenced by comic books and newspaper photographs.
Images of celebrities or fictional characters in comic books,
advertisements and fan magazines.
In sculpture, an innovative use of media e.g. plastics
The group discussions centered on popular culture implications from
such elements as mass advertising, movies, product design, comic
strips, science fiction and technology.
They used material of "found objects" such as, advertising, comic book
characters, magazine covers and various mass-produced graphics that
mostly represented American popular culture.
KEY ARTISTS:
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Richard Hamilton
Andy Warhol
- probably the most famous figure in Pop Art
- Art critic Arthur Danto once called Warhol "the nearest thing to a
philosophical genius the history of art has produced".
- Attempted to take Pop beyond an artistic style to a life style, and
his work often displays a lack of human affectation that dispenses
with the irony and parody of many of his peers.
Roy Lichtenstein - 1923 –1997
- His work was heavily influenced by both popular advertising and
the comic book style.
Tom Wesselmann
Keith Haring
Robert Indiana
2 PARAGRAPH RESPONSE (INDIVIDUAL)
Structural Frame: Compare these two examples of
Pop Art.
Cultural Frame: Explain how the context of these
images have affected the subject matter, choice of
materials and techniques.
Full citations
Title: Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing
Artist: Richard Hamilton
Material: Collage
Size: 26 cm x 24.8 cm
Title: Hopeless
Artist: Roy Lichtenstein
Material: Oil and acrylic on canvas
Size: 111.8 cm x 111.8 cm (medium – large scale)
Structural Frame: Compare these two examples of Pop Art.
‘ Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? ‘ Richard Hamilton- British
‘Hopeless’ – Lichtenstein
The collage depicts a muscle-man provocatively holding a Tootsie Pop and a woman with large, bare
breasts wearing a lampshade hat, surrounded by emblems of 1950s affluence from a vacuum cleaner to
a large canned ham. Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? is widely
acknowledged as one of the first pieces of Pop Art and his written definition of what ‘pop' is laid the
ground for the whole international movement. Hamilton's definition of Pop Art was - "Pop Art is:
popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, and
Big Business" - stressing its everyday, commonplace values. He thus created collages incorporating
advertisements from mass-circulation newspapers and magazines.
Hopeless is a lithographic reproduction of the oil and magna painting. Lichtenstein created a
reproduction of a comic image. Hopeless is depicting women in various states of distress, anxiety, fear,
and pain. It portrays women not as the heroine but as a dependent slave to the male’s individuality. In
addition, Lichtenstein creates a tension between high and low art through the implementation of text.
Associated with popular media and excluded from “fine art” at the time, text (in the form of the
dialogue bubble) builds this high/low tension into the work itself, resisting the pressure for a pure
medium art form and adding another level of signification to the image of a crying girl.
Cultural Frame: Explain how the context of these images have affected the subject matter, choice of
materials and techniques.
The context of America in the 1950s-1960s has fundamentally influenced the artwork produced by pop
artists. They were replicating advertising in magazines, comic book images in the case of Hamilton
through collage and Lichtenstein comic books.
In 1961, Lichtenstein broke completely from his earlier style and developed the cartoon/comic-based
style that he is primarily associated with today. Most of his images are based on comic strips, war
comics, and advertisements, but Lichtenstein turned them into powerful works of art by simplifying the
color schemes and mimicking commercial structural techniques. Lichtenstein also gave his works black
borders, much like those seen in comic strips, and enlarged them to strengthen their formal aspects. The
goal of these techniques was to expose and comment on the artificial, banal, and empty qualities of
contemporary American capitalist culture.