Pop
Art was the visual art movement that characterised a sense
of optimism during the post war consumer boom of the 1950's
and 1960's. It coincided with the globalization of pop
music and youth culture, personified by Elvis and the
Beatles. Pop Art was brash, young and fun and hostile
to the artistic establishment. It included different styles
of painting and sculpture from various countries, but
what they all had in common was an interest in mass-media,
mass-production and mass-culture.
BRITISH
POP ART
Eduardo
Paolozzi (1924-2005)
‘I
was a Rich Man's Plaything’
(collage,
1947)
Tate
Gallery, London
The
word 'POP' was first coined in 1954, by the British art
critic Lawrence Alloway, to describe a new type of art
that was inspired by the imagery of popular culture. Alloway,
alongside the artists Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi,
was among the founding members of the Independent Group,
a collective of artists, architects, and writers who explored
radical approaches to contemporary visual culture during
their meetings at ICA in London between 1952 and 1955.
They became the forerunners to British Pop art. At their
first meeting Paolozzi gave a visual lecture entitled
'Bunk' (short for 'bunkum' meaning nonsense)
which took an ironic look at the all-American lifestyle.
This was illustrated by a series collages created from
American magazines that he received from GI's still resident
in Paris in the late 1940s. 'I was a Rich Man's Plaything',
one of the 'Bunk' series, was the first visual artwork
to include the word 'POP'.
Richard
Hamilton (1922-
)
‘Just
what is it that makes today’s homes so different,
so appealing?’
(collage,
1956)
Kunsthalle
Tübingen
Some
young British artists in the 1950’s, who grew up
with the wartime austerity of ration books and utility
design, viewed the seductive imagery of American popular
culture and its consumerist lifestyle with a romantic
sense of irony and a little bit of envy. They saw America
as being the land of the free - free from the crippling
conventions of a class ridden establishment that could
suffocate the culture they envisaged: a more inclusive,
youthful culture that embraced the social influence of
mass media and mass production. Pop Art became their mode
of expression in this search for change and its language
was adapted from Dada collages and assemblages. The Dadaists
had created irrational combinations of random images to
provoke a reaction from the establishment of their day.
British Pop artists adopted a similar visual technique
but focused their attention on the mass imagery of popular
culture which they waved as a challenge in the face of
the establishment.
Richard
Hamilton’s collage of 1956, ‘Just What Is
It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?’
is the ultimate catalogue of pop art imagery: comics,
newspapers, advertising, cars, food, packaging, appliances,
celebrity, sex, the space age, television and the movies.
A black and white version of this collage was used as
the cover for the catalogue of the 'This Is Tomorrow'
exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1956. This show
heralded a widening of our understanding of what culture
is and inspired a new generation of young British artists
that included Eduardo Paolozzi, Peter Blake, David Hockney,
Allen Jones, Joe Tilson, Derek Boshier, Richard Smith
and R.B Kitaj.
AMERICAN
POP ART
Pop
art in America evolved in a slightly differently way to
its British counterpart. American Pop Art was both a development
of and a reaction against Abstract Expressionist painting.
Abstract Expressionism was the first American art movement
to achieve global acclaim but, by the mid-1950's, many
felt it had become too introspective and elitist. American
Pop Art evolved as an attempt to reverse this trend by
reintroducing the image as a structural device in painting,
to pull art back from the obscurity of abstraction into
the real world again. This was a model that had been tried
and tested before. Picasso had done something similar
forty years previously when he collaged 'real world' printed
images onto his still lifes, as he feared that his painting
was becoming too abstract. Around 1955, two remarkable
artists emerged who would lay the foundations of a bridge
between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. They were
Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, the forerunners
of American Pop Art.
Jasper
Johns (1930- )
‘Numbers
in Color, 1958-59’
(encaustic
and newspaper on canvas)
Albright-Knox
Art Gallery
Jasper
Johns early artworks question how we look at, perceive
and make art. He does not distinguish between subject
and object in his work, or art and life for that matter.
In his eyes they are both the same thing. Johns believes
that we should not look upon a painting as a representation
or illusion but as an object with its own reality.
Like
the forerunners of British Pop Art, Johns was influenced
by Dada ideas, in particular the 'readymades' (found objects)
of Marcel Duchamp, whose bottle racks and bicycle wheels
challenged the definition of the art object.
However,
it was not 'found objects' that Johns introduced as a
subject for his paintings, but ‘found images’
- flags, targets, letters and numbers - and it was this
iconography of familiar signs that appealed to Pop. He
saw them as "pre-formed, conventional, depersonalised,
factual, exterior elements."
Johns'
depersonalized images provided an antidote to the obscure
personal abstraction of late Abstract Expressionism. His
use of such neutral icons offered him a subject that was
immediately recognisable but so ordinary that it left
him free to work on other levels. His subjects provided
him with a structure upon which he could explore the visual
and physical qualities of his medium. The results were
a careful balance between representation and abstraction.
Johns
painted in encaustic, an archaic medium that dates from
the first century which fuses pigment in hot wax. He combined
encaustic with newspaper collage to create a seductive
expanse of paint where his sensitive mark-making articulates
the surface of the work. His fascination with the overall
unity of the surface plane in a picture places him in
a tradition that stretches back through Cubism and Cézanne
to Chardin.
Johns'
art plays with visual ideas that have layers of meaning
and communicate on various levels. It is both sensual
and cerebral - an art about art and the way we relate
to it.
Robert
Rauschenberg (1925-
2008)
‘Retroactive
1’
(oil
and silkscreen on canvas, 1964)
Wadsworth
Atheneum
Robert
Rauschenberg also used 'found images' in his art but,
unlike Johns' images, they are combined in a relationship
with one another or with real objects. The work of both
these artists is often referred to as Neo-Dada as it draws
on ‘found elements’, first explored by Dadaists
like Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters.
Inspired
by Schwitters who created collages from the refuse he
picked up on the street, Rauschenberg combined real objects,
that he found in his New York neighborhood, with collage
and painting. He said, “I actually had a house
rule. If I walked completely round the block and didn't
have enough to work with, I could take one other block
and walk around it in any direction – but that was
it.” He called these multi-media assemblages
‘combines’, which “had
to look at least as interesting as anything that was going
on outside the window”. Rauschenberg believed
that “painting is more like the real world if
it's made out the real world”.
Collage was Rauschenberg’s natural language and
he added to its vocabulary by developing a method of combining
oil painting with photographic silkscreen. This allowed
him to experiment with contemporary images gathered from
newspapers, magazines, television and film which he could
reproduce in any size and color as a compositional element
on a canvas or print. He used these elements in a way
that mirrors our experience of mass-media. Everyday we
are bombarded with images from television, newspapers
and magazines, disregarding most but retaining a few that
relate, either consciously or subconsciously, to our individual
experience and understanding. Rauschenberg's
paintings capture this visual 'noise' in a framework of
images whose narratives suggest some kind of ironic allegory.
Rauschenberg
was interested in our changing perception and interpretation
of images: "I'm sure we don't read old paintings
the way they were intended." In 'Retroactive
1', Rauschenberg plays with the way we have read paintings
since the early Renaissance. The composition recalls early
religious icons where the central figure of Christ or
a saint would have been surrounded by some smaller narrative
panels. An iconic image of the venerated President Kennedy,
the most powerful man in the world who was assassinated
in the previous year, holds the central position as he
forcefully issues a warning. He points to the red image
on his right which looks deceptively like Masaccio's 'Expulsion
of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden' c.1432 from the
Brancacci Chapel in Florence. With the symbolic association
of 'red' and the mushroom-shaped cloud hovering above
the president's head, this could easily be interpreted
as a cold war reference to the Cuban Missile Crisis, ironically
using a creation allegory to represent the Doomsday scenario.
However, Rauschenberg is not that simple. If you look
more closely you discover that the red image is not a
section of Masaccio's fresco, but a detail from a stroboscopic
flash photograph for Life magazine (10/10/1952) by Gjon
Mili of a real life reconstruction of a painting by Rauschenberg's
mentor: 'Nude Descending a Staircase, No 2' (1912) by
Marcel Duchamp.
While
a single apple is a metaphor for Original Sin in Renaissance
paintings of Adam and Eve, in 'Retroactive 1' an astronaut
parachutes back to earth only to land in an upturned box
of the 'forbidden fruit' - a symbol of how man's potential
for evil has multiplied in the modern world (in Latin,
the words for 'apple' and 'evil' are identical in their
plural form: 'mala'). Rauschenberg extends his metaphor
by illustrating in the top right of the painting what
the astronaut is returning to: Eden after the Fall - a
world polluted by industrialisation.
'Retroactive
1' is a very appropriate title for the work as it relates
to a canon of images, events and ideas across time.
Andy
Warhol (1928-1987)
‘Marilyn
Diptych ’
(silkscreen
on canvas, 1962)
Tate
Gallery, London
If
there was one artist who personified Pop Art it was Andy
Warhol. He originally worked as a 'commercial artist'
and his subject matter was derived from the imagery of
mass-culture: advertising, comics, newspapers, TV and
the movies.
Warhol
embodied the spirit of American popular culture and elevated
its imagery to the status of museum art. He used second-hand
images of celebrities and consumer products which he believed
had an intrinsic banality that made them more interesting.
He felt that they had been stripped of their meaning and
emotional presence through their mass-exposure. Typically
subverting the values of the art establishment, Warhol
was fascinated by this banality which he celebrated in
a series of subjects ranging from celebrities to soup
cans. Whether it was a painting of 'Campbell's Chicken
Noodle' or a 'Car Crash', a portrait of 'Elizabeth Taylor'
or the 'Electric Chair', Warhol's detached approach was
always the same: "I think every painting should
be the same size and the same color so they're all interchangeable
and nobody thinks they have a better or worse painting."
Warhol saw this aesthetic of mass-production as
a reflection of contemporary American culture: "What's
great about this country is that America started the tradition
where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things
as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca Cola,
and you know that the President drinks Coca Cola, Liz
Taylor drinks Coca Cola, and just think, you can drink
Coca Cola, too. A coke is a coke and no amount of money
can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the
corner is drinking. All the cokes are the same and all
the cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President
knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it." The
obvious irony of this statement is that the price of that
Coke bottle hits the stratosphere as soon as Warhol signs
it.
As
Cubism stands on the shoulders of Cézanne, Warhol's
art is dependant on Duchamp's 'readymades. He was really
a Dadaist in spirit - an 'agent provocateur'. His many
whimsical proclamations about art were deliberately enigmatic
and contrary, avoiding clarification and forcing his audience
to speculate on their meaning: "I'd prefer to
remain a mystery. I never like to give my background and,
anyway, I make it all up different every time I'm asked."
Warhol's evasive attitude was a strategy, the result
of which was self publicity. He cultivated his own image
like a business model which was inseparable from his art.
He said, "I started as a commercial artist, and
I want to finish as a business artist. Being good in business
is the most fascinating kind of art."
Warhol
was against the idea of skill and craftsmanship as a way
of expressing the artist's personality. He claimed to
have removed both craftsmanship and personality from his
own art: "The reason I'm painting this way is
that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever
I do and do machine-like is what I want to do.............If
you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the
surface of my paintings and films and me, there I am.
There's nothing behind it." His works were produced
through the mechanical processes of film and silkscreen
printing or made by others in his studio which was called
'The Factory'.
Warhol's
paradoxical statements such as, "I am a deeply
superficial person" or "art should
be meaningful in the most shallow way" are
echoed in his work. The left hand panel of his ‘Marilyn
Diptych’ is a crudely colored photograph of the
actress whose sense of 'self' is degraded through the
repetition of her image, whereas the right hand panel
is a physically degraded black and white image (as
the printing ink runs out on the silkscreen) that
reflects the ephemeral qualities of fame. Their
combined panels are a memorable discourse on the nature
of celebrity and its power to both create and destroy
its acquaintances. The
'diptych' format was originally used in medieval painting
for religious images of personal devotion, an appropriate
choice considering Warhol's fascination for Marilyn Monroe.
The work was exhibited in Warhol' first New York exhibition
at the Stable Gallery in November 1962, just weeks after
Marilyn's death from 'acute barbiturate poisoning'. The
Marilyn Diptych, along with his other famous Marilyn paintings,
is based on a 1953 publicity photograph for the film 'Niagara'
that Warhol purchased only days after she died.
Roy
Lichtenstein (1923-
1997)
‘The
Artist's Studio No. 1 (Look Mickey)’
(oil,
Magna (acrylic resin) and sand on canvas, 1973)
Walker
Art Centre
Roy
Lichtenstein developed a pop art style that was based
on the visual vernacular of mass-communication: the comic
strip. It was a style that was fixed in its format: black
outlines, bold colors and tones rendered by Benday dots
(a method of printing tones in comic books from the 1950's
and 60's). What actually changed through the development
of Lichtenstein's art was his subject matter which evolved
from comic strips to an exploration of modernist art styles:
Cubism,
Futurism, Art
Deco, De Stijl, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism.
Roy
Lichtenstein's early work had a hint of Americana - "Expressionistic
Cubism ....of cowboys and Indians" was how he
put it - but it was still based on the painterly conventions
that he had been taught to respect. Bored with the glut
of Expressionist
feeling that was around at the time, Lichtenstein attacked
this sagging tradition with paintings like 'Look Mickey'
(1961), a large scale cartoon image which "was
done from a bubble gum wrapper" (a detail of
this work can be seen in The Artist's Studio No.1, 1973).
His comic strip images had an initial shock value, but
like much of Pop they were quickly embraced by the galleries
and collectors. Lichtenstein remarked, "It was
hard to get a painting that was despicable enough so that
no one would hang it.......everybody was hanging everything.
It was almost acceptable to hang a dripping paint rag,
everybody was accustomed to this. The one thing everyone
hated was commercial art; apparently they didn't hate
that enough, either."
The
hard-edged commercial style of Lichtenstein's comic book
paintings was an antidote to the incoherent splashes of
late Abstract Expressionism, but it was not simply intended
as an act of Pop/Dada protest, "I don't think
that Pop would have existed without Dada having existed
before it, but I don't really think that Pop is Dada.
I don't think that I look on my work as being anti-art
or anything that's different from the mainstream of painting
since the Renaissance." Although there is an
element of irony and humor in Lichtenstein's style, his
work lies within the classical tradition of control in
the use of line, shape, tone and color as compositional
elements. The discipline of the work is cerebral with
little left to impulse or emotion or what he calls 'the
character of art'. "My work sanitizes it (emotion)
but it is also symbolic of commercial art sanitizing human
feelings. I think it can be read that way........People
mistake the character of line for the character of art.
But it’s really the position of line that’s
important, or the position of anything, any contrast,
not the character of it."
Lichtenstein
does not exactly copy his comic book images; he subtly
refines them, conscious of their transformed appearance
on a larger scale and aware of their aesthetic interpretation
within the context of the museum. (You can get an idea
of this effect on David Barsalou's Lichtenstein
Project.) As his style developed he move away from
using the imagery of comics to interpreting modernist
art styles, but still in his comic book vernacular. Lichtenstein
was able to maintain this singular style for over thirty
five years, not simply by varying his subject matter,
but by viewing his art as an independent entity with an
existence and development that he controlled, "I
like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me."
Claes
Oldenburg (1922-
)
and Coosje van Bruggen (1942-2009)
‘Spoonbridge
and Cherry’ photo:
Mike
Hicks
(alluminium,
stainless steel and paint, 1985-88)
Minneapolis
Sculpture Garden
Claes
Oldenburg was the Pop Artist who gravitated towards sculpture
more than any of his contemporaries. At the start of 1960's
he was involved in various 'Happenings': spontaneous,
improvised, artistic events where the experience of the
participants was more important than an end product -
a kind of consumer art encounter for a consumer culture.
Oldenburg
found his inspiration in the imagery of consumer merchandise,
"I am for Kool-art, 7-UP art, Pepsi-art, Sunshine
art, 39 cents art, 15 cents art, Vatronol Art, Dro-bomb
art, Vam art, Menthol art, L & M art, Ex-lax art,
Venida art, Heaven Hill art, Pamryl art, San-o-med art,
Rx art, 9.99 art, Now art, New art, How art, Fire sale
art, Last Chance art, Only art, Diamond art, Tomorrow
art, Franks art, Ducks art, Meat-o-rama art." In
1961 he opened 'the Store' where he sold plaster replicas
of fast foodstuff and junk merchandise whose crudely painted
surfaces were an obvious parody of Abstract Expressionism.
He used the front shop of 'The Store' as a gallery while
he replenished his stock from his studio in the back shop.
Oldenburg's
work is full of humorous irony and contradiction: on one
hand he makes hard objects like a bathroom sink out soft
sagging vinyl, while on the other he makes soft objects
like a cheeseburger out of hard painted plaster. He also
subverts the relative size of objects by taking small
items like the spoon and cherry above and recreating them
on an architectural scale. He said, "I like to
take a subject and deprive it of its function completely."
By undermining the form, scale and function of an object
Oldenburg contradicts its meaning and forces the spectator
to reassess its presence. When you see his large scale
public works in their environmental settings, they have
a powerful surrealist quality like Gulliver at Brobdingnag.
Claes
Oldenburg has collaborated with Dutch/American pop sculptor
Coosje van Bruggen since 1976. They were married in 1977.
Coosje van Bruggen died in January, 2009.
- Pop
Art coincided with the globalization of Pop Music
and youth culture.
- Pop
Art included different styles of painting and sculpture
but all had a common interest in mass-media, mass-production
and mass-culture.
- Although
Pop Art started in Britain, its is essentially an
American movement.
- Pop
art was strongly influence by the ideas of the Dada
movement.
- Pop
Art in America was a reaction against Abstract Expressionism.
- The
art of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg is seen
as a bridge between Abstract Expressionism and Pop
Art.
- The
artist who personifies Pop Art more than any other
is Andy Warhol.
- Warhol's
paintings of Marilyn Monroe are the most famous icons
of Pop Art.
- Roy
Lichtenstein developed an instantly recognizable style
of Pop Art inspired by the American comic strip.
- Claes
Oldenburg was the greatest sculptor of the Pop Art
movement, creating many large scale public works.
