POP ART MOVEMENT

Pop Art was one of the United States’ major artistic movements of the 20th century - aside from Abstract Expressionism, it was probably the biggest. It actually was first coined in Britain in 1955 but unsurprisingly the Americans took up the consumerist cause with much greater effect and conviction, and became the pioneers of the movement. Pop art and pop culture refers to the products of the mass media evolving in the late 1950s and 60s and also to the works of art that draw upon popular culture - packaging, television, advertisements, comic books, the cinema. Pop art was the medium that made real the breaking down of barriers that had existed for hundreds of hears between high (old-fashioned) art and mass culture.

In America, Pop Art is often considered as a counter-attack against Abstract Expressionism because it used more figurative aspects in its works. It was also related closely to Dada, an earlier movement (largely French) that poked fun at the highbrow and serious nature of the art world and also used everyday objects and mundane subjects. Warhol’s rows of Campbell’s tins of tomato soup are equivalent to Marcel Duchamp’s bicycles and urinals placed in galleries.

The Pop Artists favoured commercial methods of production, not dissimilar to the subjects they were using, as it meant that unlimited reproductions could be made. And this is typical of the perio because Pop Art happened out of a crucial time - it was inseparable from the prosperous and affluent era post-World War II. It was a time of enormous economic growth for the States and America was fast becoming a voracious consumer-orientated society. It was the beginning of the age of commercial manipulation, celebrities, exhibitionism and instant success. It was also the beginning of the age of homogenisation - of uniformity in commercial franchises, restaurants and languages or dialects.

Britain wasn’t too far behind the glossy commercialism found in the States although the British artist’s interpretation of the pop-culture was a bit more romantic than the Americans - a bit less brash perhaps. Our artists (like Peter Blake, David Hockney, Allen Jones and Richard Hamilton) didn’t create giant hamburgers in the style of Claes Oldenburg, nor did they paint Diana Dors with quite the same consequences as Andy Warhol found with Marilyn Monroe. They found their inspiration from America, not from Britain particularly, and so to them Pop Art was ‘an unhibited hymn to a civilisation half-real and half-imagined, a wonderland of pin-ups and pin-ball machines’ (Edward Lucie-Smith). They were more detached from it compared to their American contemporaries.

Pop art is lots of things that high-art isn’t - it’s mass-produced, it is expendable, it is low-cost, glamorous, witty and encourages big bucks, bright lights and big celebrities - there’s no sign of the impoverished artist slaving away in a tiny studio in this movement. However, it’s light-hearted sensibilities have been negated by some critics; Harold Rosenberg described Pop art as being ‘Like a joke without humour, told over and over again until it begins to sound like a threat… Advertising art which advertises itself as art that hates advertising.’

Is Pop art a serious comment on the contemporary condition – are the Pop artists cynical of the growing mass-media, material culture or is it simply just popular art – accessible, bright and glossy? (Rose Troughton - Artsworld- www.getpopart.com)