Artistic Currents - Pop - art

Beginning in 1956 in England, early 1960's USA

Pop Art has started in England in late 50's and grown in United States in early 60's. Among the Pop Art forerunners are two unique models - prototypes of the modern artists: the French artist Marcel Duchamp and the German Kurt Schwitters. Duchamp's work and his thoughts have altered the definition of the art and our way of understanding it. He was famous with his "ready-mades," objects torn from their usual contexts and exhibited as art. Kurt Schwitters produced collages and assemblages that lay somewhere between painting and sculpture. The work of his art turned into an environment that was no longer something only to be looked at.

English art critic Lawrence Alloway used the term "Pop" first to describe the art that made use of the objects, materials and technologies from mass culture to bring out the yields of the industrial society. It is often borrowed from advertising, photography, comic strips and other mass media sources. Everyday life is endless resource for the pop art … today is the core of pop art.
Pop stresses frontal presentation and flatness of unmodulated and unmixed color bound by hard edges. They suggest the depersonalized processes of mass production. Pop Art investigates in areas of popular taste and kitsch previously considered outside the limits of fine art. It was rejecting the attributes associated with art as an expression of personality. Works were close enough to reality and at the same time it was clear that they were no ready-mades but artificial re-creations of real things.
Pop Art definitely broke the hegemony of the Abstract Expressionism in Europe and United States that occupied center art stage in 1950's-1960. It excreted the edges between high and low art. It confronted institutional art with everyday endless objects which gained, displayed as art, a new quality.

After the large-scale pop art exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York in 1962, Pop Art established itself as a serious, recognized form of art. This exhibition becomes a turning point for Pop Art. According to a series of critics, Pop Art marked the end of modernism and the beginning of the postmodern era. Although Pop is rather treated as an entertainment, it had a profound impact on the art scene.

There are some differences between the Pop Art in England and United States.
British Pop was the product of the Independent Group (IG), formed in 1952 whose members resisted the institute's commitment to modernist art, design, and architecture. They were particularly intrigued by American automobile design, with its emphasis on "planned obsolescence," the intentional production of goods that would soon require replacement. British Pop artists had optimistic point of view. They preferably dealt with various forms of direct action - assemblages and happenings rather than comics or AD. In Britain popular culture and technology was just the subject of the popular art.

In America Pop artists reproduced, duplicated, combined, overlaid and arranged the endless visual details that make up American society, introducing shifts and transformations and acting like commentaries. The most famous American Pop artist, Andy Warhol specially had a lifelong interest in movie stars which first surfaced in his art in 1962 when he begun working on portraits of Marilyn Monroe. Warhole attempted to keep his personal fascination with fame from showing through too clearly in his works, preferring to leave their meaning open to the interpretation of viewers. The Pop and media role was summarized with Warhol's famous quotation:" In the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes". Television, newspapers, magazines and Hollywood are just producing new images everyday. They are only enlarging the popular culture. Everything is just an image, ready to be consumed. The reality aura of art work is death, the millions copies are the survival of it.

Main Representatives
Forerunners of Pop:
Marcel Duchamp
Kurt Schwitters

In Britain:
Eduardo Paolozzi
Peter Blake
Richard Hamilton
Allan Jones
Tom Phillips

In America:
Roy Lichtenstein
Andy Warhol
Claes Oldenburg
Jasper Johns
Tom Wesselmann
Robert Rauschenberg

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