POP ART
The title of this art movement comes from the word popular – as in popular music, or pop music. Pop Art took its inspiration from popular culture – the culture of the populace, of the people.
It began in the late 1950s and is especially associated with the1960s. Pop art reflected everyday life and common objects. Pop artists blurred the line between fine art and commercial art.
Andy Warhol Campbell’s Soup Can
Is this fine art or just packaging?
Richard Hamilton, a British artist and critic, referred to Pop Art, as, "popular, transient, expendable, low- cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, and Big Business" – he stressed Pop Art’s everyday, commonplace values.
Many people loved this democratization of art. Art didn’t have to be elitist, they felt. Why not make it accessible and understandable to the masses, they argued.
Others felt that Pop Art cheapened the traditional function of art, which was to uphold and represent culture’s most valuable ideals. What do you think?
Pop Artists used common images from everyday culture as their sources including: advertisements, celebrities, comic strips, photographs, and consumer goods
Andy Warhol – Marilyn Monroe
Roy Lichtenstein
Lichtenstein –Mmaybe
Pop Artists used bold, flat colors and hard edge compositions adopted from commercial designs like those found in: billboards, murals, magazines, and newspapers.
Pop Artists reflected 60’s culture by using new materials in their artworks including: acrylic paints, plastics, photographs, fluorescent colours and metallic colours. They experimented with new technologies and methods: Mass production, Fabrication, Photography, Printing, and Serials.
Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol was one of the most famous Pop Artists. Part of his artistic practice was using new technologies and new ways of making art including: Photographic Silk-Screening Repetition Mass production Collaboration Media events
Warhol appropriated (used without permission) images from magazines, newspapers, and press photos of the most popular people of his time including Elizabeth Taylor and Jackie Kennedy.
Andy Warhol Jackie Kennedy
Andy Warhol – silkscreen print of Jackie Kennedy
Andy Warhol – silkscreen print of the actress Elizabeth Taylor
Andy Warhol Elvis Presley
Andy Warhol Silkscreen print of the actress Ingrid Bergman
Warhol took common everyday items and gave them importance as “art” He raised questions about the nature of art. For example: What makes one work of art better than another?
Robert Rauschenberg
Rauschenberg began to create what he called combines, in the late 1950s. He would assemble unlikely combinations of objects as three dimensional sculptures.
As the Pop Art movement developed in the 1960s, he turned from three dimensional “combines” to silkscreened collages, using magazine and newspaper photographs and then painting into and over them.
These collages allowed him to make visual statements about contemporary issues.
Robert Rauschenberg
Signs