pop art

pop art

The Evolution and Impact of Pop Art: A Comprehensive Study

1. Introduction to Pop Art

1.2 The Emergence of Pop 2. Pop by way of Reaction 3. The Repeated Use of Similar Motifs and Themes 4. The Origin of Mass Media Imagery 5. The Importance of the Relationship between Negative and Positive 6. Reaction by way of Imitation 7. Negating Art so as to Create High Art 8. After the Feeding Frenzy: Negating Modern Man, but in a ‘Nice’ way 9. Hit and Runs 10. Conjunctions Out of Context 11. What made Pat do it? 12. Wooster: The Genetic Material 13. Doubts, and the eventual Demise of British Pop Art

1.1 Abstract Pop Art, despite its fame, never had much of a clear theoretical framework. This helps explain the subsumption of the term effectively within Commodity Art. The main focus of this book is to try and trace out a clearer perspective on what Pop actually represented and to look at the variety of what was included within that term and show the range of the impact of its emergence upon art both in Britain and America.

2. Key Characteristics and Techniques of Pop Art

If the works themselves are examined closely, the Impressionists and the Post-Impressionists only infrequently produced typical academic women. That is to say, although they made some mothers, husbands, and sweethearts, they did not make many, and when they did, they changed the image from a standard academic study. Matisse devoted less than ten percent of his life’s work to mature pictures, and within the genre, he concentrated on paintings of the very young and beautiful. For the most part, so long as important art has attempted to portray the negative side of contemporary life, it has concentrated on the misfortune of housewives, daughters, and sisters.

Low and Popular Sources

The first feature of Pop Art is that it shares with most modern art of the last 90 years or so an iconographic interest. This fascination with certain subjects is a characteristic of the most ancient art as well, and in the eighteenth century, the Romans adhering to the taste for classical art of the 5th century B.C. continued to paint classical subjects. But the centrality of the theme is relatively uncommon in the history of art. Early Medieval art was primarily ornamental or illustrative of Christian doctrine. A major interest of the medieval and Renaissance churches was devotional art. With the collapse of feudalism and the rise of the bourgeoisie, we begin to observe a diversity of major subjects: genre scenes, landscapes, portraits, and realistic naturalistic paintings. These styles have continued to have a large public ever since. Surrealism and abstraction, like Pop, have been much admired by a coterie of connoisseurs, but none of them has captured the fancy of millions.

Iconographic Appeal

3. Notable Pop Art Movements and Artists

There was a decline in the vibrancy and excitement of Pop art from 1968 onwards, which was due to the artists beginning to lose their initial enthusiasm in the subject matters that were once so captivating and exciting. The drive to create major gains and indisputable works of the period and criticism offered time for reflection on the value and authenticity of Pop art. The close relationship between Pop art and the American way of life, along with the emphasis on the trivial in life, began to fritter away. The time frame for the movement started about 1960 and began to decline about 1968, or about ten years. The movement was alive for a short period, but happened to be sustained with a great deal of enthusiasm from people of all areas of the world. It became the first American art movement of importance. Since approximately 1970, artists have turned to the ‘aesthetics’ of consumerism in an effort to develop a more secure foundation for contemporary art. The movement looks at a physique of enigmatic, multifaceted works, but nowadays we question whether they are ‘popular’ enough to be classified as ‘pop’.

4. Influence of Pop Art on Contemporary Culture

Whether this is the result of the distinction between principle and profit, it is undeniable that the mass culture they ridiculed began to look upon their art as something to cling towards; the artists were revered as their counterparts in the realm of high culture. One of the outcomes of the works of the early 1960s were that, for the most part, the portrait of Elsie De Wolfe, who once expressed the obituary of aristocracies, might have been the woman on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar. The stars of Hollywood were the latest, the fashion sensibility of boys and girls and the teen idols, and the products they visualized were the objects of her material desires.

One of the most remarkable features of the artwork produced by the Pop artists is that it was born out of a society full of consumer goods and mass exploitation, which turned its artists into, in essence, mass-produced brands themselves. Their work too had become so successful that it could be mass marketed across the globe. So the works of artists like Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Claes Oldenburg, while critiquing mass culture, have also become mass culture themselves. Throughout the following sections, we will examine how the products and people depicted in Pop became not only a part of a flourishing art market, outwardly expressing capitalism, but also created a well-oiled, worldwide machine.

5. Conclusion and Future of Pop Art

The first Pop Art, in the fifties and sixties of the 20th century, was developed in the United States. It was a critical reaction by American artists to American consumerism. The idea was to move non-art objects from the world of art to the real world by converting them back to non-art mass products. Art should be based on the interaction between celebrities, glamorous people, commodities, commerce, multi-colored, full of life, and energy as mass media – advertising, comics, movies, TV, newspapers, and magazines were. After the United States, Pop Art developed as a challenge to capitalist society in Russia, staying true to its origin, focusing on political consumerism with a special duality which can only be found in totalitarian societies: heroes are the poor communist class that live and consume art which is beyond the reach of their income. When it comes to natural resources and energy, the developed countries, in the mid-twentieth century, were what China is nowadays. However, it is not so difficult to see the complex and profound influence of Russian avant-garde in Pop Art development in Western Europe. It was like a slingshot competition, with the light at the beginning and, because of the differences in the systems, the return to the center of the world of the avant-garde. Then the target of Pop Art was Russia, transformed but still a target. With the end of the Cold War in the seventies of the 20th century (USA, Russia, and Western Europe were the triumphant countries) and the appearance of the Pop Art trend in the world, there is no more world of art; it was replaced by the real world. Artworks moved from museums and galleries to consumers by appearing in mass production on all kinds of objects and products and being part of mass media. While drawing the natural conclusion of breaking the gap between avant-garde and design was achieved, the process was still separated in the 20th century. However, it should be noted that exhibitions were organized to emphasize the co-creativity of two artistic phenomena: Ready Made and Design.

Changes in technology and in society have an important influence on civilization and art. Avant-garde and modern art trends after World War II, the different backgrounds of the artists developing these trends – the United States, Russia, and Western Europe – and their different approaches provide a very good illustration of that influence. At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, progressive artists in Europe were focusing on the design of futuristic objects. This interest in industrial progress and technological improvement should not be a surprise, as the evolution of technology made it possible for artists to draw, shape, and paint works of art using new materials introduced by technology. Before World War II, art focused on a human-oriented design of certain objects: planes, cars, ships, furniture. After World War II, for developed countries, art became industrial design and focused on the design of all types of products for all types of people.