Pop Art - page 4
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: 4 of 6 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6
and Rauschenberg experimented with large expressionistically brushed areas of colour and made use of traditional artistic materials. American Abstract Impressionism in particular, led the way to Pop Art by weaning the public onto large, boldly coloured paintings.
By the 1960s Abstract expressionism had reached its peak and the artistic climate in both America and Western Europe was rapidly changing. Post-war severity and constraint were being succeeded by consumer-society affluence and prosperity. In the mid-1950s, just when Abstract expressionism was celebrating its triumphs, the power of American liberalism and the exponents of non-objective art in New York were confronted with the blatantly representational images of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. At the time they were considered part of the Neo-Dada movement which is exemplified by its use of modern materials and popular imagery. It also patently denied the traditional concepts of aesthetics. The term was popularised by Barbara Rose in the 1960s and helped to inspire Pop Art.
Jasper Johns played a leading role in the development of Pop Art. His early works included simple objects such as flags, maps, targets, letters and numbers. Such subjects attracted him because they were conventional and de-personalised, familiar and available to all. Jasper Johns also said they appealed to him because “They suggest the world rather than personality”. He often uses Encaustic, a wax-like paint used primarily by the Greeks, which gives his paintings a thick, relief-like surface. The contrast between the graphical symbolic subject matter and the loosely handled surface raises the question "can a painting be what it depicts?" Johns also strove to play with and present opposites and ironies in his work, which purposely criticised the individual artist’s power of self-expression. A famous example of his work is “Three Flags”, in which Johns chose to represent the American flag because it was the most banal and easily recognisable subject he could find. In this painting Johns has superimposed three differently sized flags on top of one another, reinforcing the image, almost like a flashing light and creating a strange optical effect.
Robert Rauschenberg was another artist who provided much of the inspiration for the Pop Art movement in the USA. In 1952 Rauschenberg began his series of "Black Paintings" and "Red Paintings," in which large, expressionistically brushed areas of colour were combined with collage and found objects attached to the canvas. He broke down traditional boundaries between painting
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