Pop Art - page 3
Keywords: The History of the Pop Art movement 1950s-60s
By s19 on 07/11/2006 18:13:55
Level: A Level (Year 12) / AS Level
Page Number: 3 of 6 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6
of popular culture. They filled their houses with nostalgia, souvenirs, and advertising symbols and succumbed to comics, science-fiction, trashy novels and television addiction. This positive reappraisal of commercial and popular culture occurred on several levels. For example, the entertainment industry was now thriving on Pop music. In the sixties, the younger generation’s sense of identity and reality found expression in the lyrics and music of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Artists like Peter Blake, Richard Hamilton and Andy Warhol designed LP covers for pop groups such as The Beatles and The Velvet Underground. Also, souvenirs and imagery of the mass media, consumer goods and packaging industries became the subjects of art. The mass media encouraged an internationalization of styles and forms of expression, making every symbol and art universally acceptable.
Although America had been the forefront of development in Western art ever since the late nineteenth century, it was not until after the Second World War that New York overtook Paris as the focal point of new art in the west. The war symbolised the end of European imperialism, with the loss of political and economic power and also the end of the European cultural predominance in the West.
Pop Art is widely interpreted as a reaction to the then-dominant ideas of Abstract Expressionism. This was a movement in which artists typically applied paint rapidly, and with force to their huge canvases in an effort to show feelings and emotions. They painted non-geometrically, applying paint with large brushes and sometimes dripping or even throwing it onto canvas. Their work is characterized by a strong dependence on what appears to be accident and chance, but which is actually highly planned. Pop Art broke the authority of the Abstract Expressionism in Europe and United States that occupied centre art stage in 1950's-1960. Pop Art countered the subjectivism and obsessive cult of self realisation in Abstract Expressionism. It also rejected the inner restlessness of the expressive mode in favour of intellectual clarity and conceptual order. It excreted the edges between high and low art and confronted institutional art with everyday endless objects which gained, displayed as art, a new quality. Pop Art counters abstraction with realism, the emotional with the intellectual, and spontaneity with conceptual strategy. Pop artists adopted many of the techniques practised by their abstract contempories. For example, Andy Warhol used dripping paint in his earlier works
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