Pop Art
Pop Art, or Popular Art, is a visual artistic movement that emerged in both Great Britain and the USA in the late 1950s and reached its peak in the 1960s. It is one of the major art movements of the twentieth century. Pop Art is considered to be a reaction against the seriousness of the abstract expressionism and a revolt against prevailing conventions in art and life in general. Pop art is the apparent celebration of western consumerism after the austerity and rationing of the war years.
It can also be interpreted as one of the first manifestations of Postmodernism.
Pop artists used a common imagery found in comic strips, soup cans, and Coke bottles to express formal abstract relationships. Incorporating techniques of sign painting and commercial art into their work, as well as commercial literary imagery, pop artists such attempted to combine elements of popular and high culture to erase the boundaries between the two.
Modernist critics were shocked by the Pop artists' use of such low subject matter and by their apparently uncritical treatment of it. In fact Pop both took art into new areas of subject matter and developed new ways of presenting it in art. Chief artists in America were Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol.
Roy Lichtenstein is most famous for his imagery that is based on comic strips, with their themes of passion, romance, science fiction, violence, and war. In these, Lichtenstein employs the techniques of commercial art: projectors magnify and spray-gun stencils create dots to make the pictures look like newspaper cartoons seen through a magnifying glass.
Claes Oldenburg worked in a variety of modes, including drawing, painting, film, soft sculpture, and large scale sculpture in steel, but his most recognizable works are the giant monuments of everyday objects. By taking these mundane objects and presenting them out of context and in such colossal proportions, Oldenburg forced viewers to reassess their daily lives and values. His work was a social commentary on American popular culture and, by association, on contemporary society's approach to life itself. His Floor Burger, Fag End and Giant Ice Bag are some of his large-scale sculptures that were meant as indoor exhibits. Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks (1969) was Oldenburg's first monument realized for an outdoor setting.
Andy Warhol was the leading figure of the pop art movement and one of the most influential artists of the late twentieth century. Warhol concentrated on the surface of things, choosing his imagery from the world of everyday objects such as dollar bills, soup cans, soft-drink bottles, and soap-pad boxes. He is variously credited with ridiculing and celebrating American middle-class values by erasing the distinction between popular and high culture. Monotony and repetition became the hallmarks of his multi-image, mass-produced silk-screen paintings, such as the portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Kennedy, Che Guevara, and many other great icons of that time, as well as his self-portraits.
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