Pop art. A movement based on the imagery of consumerism and popular culture, flourishing from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, chiefly in the USA and Britain. The term was coined
c.1955 by Lawrence
Alloway. Comic books, advertisements, packaging, and images from television and the cinema were all part of the iconography of the movement, and it was a feature of Pop art in both the USA and Britain that it rejected any distinction between good and bad taste.
In the USA Pop art was initially regarded as a reaction from
Abstract Expressionism because its exponents brought back figural imagery and made use of
Hard-Edge techniques. It was seen as a descendant of
Dada (in fact Pop art is sometimes called
Neo-Dada) because it debunked the seriousness of the art world and embraced the use or reproduction of commonplace subjects (comic strips, soup tins, highway signs) in a manner that had affinities with
Duchamp's ready-mades. The most immediate inspiration, however, was the work of Jasper
Johns and Robert
Rauschenberg, both of whom began to make an impact on the New York art scene in the mid-1950s. They opened a wide new range of subject matter with Johns's paintings of flags, targets, and numbers and his sculptures of objects such as beer cans and Rauschenberg's
collages and
combine paintings featuring Coca-Cola bottles, stuffed birds, and photographs from magazines and newspapers. While often using similar subject matter, Pop artists generally favoured commercial techniques in preference to the painterly manner of Johns and Rauschenberg. Examples are Andy
Warhol's screenprints of soup tins and so on, Roy
Lichtenstein's paintings in the manner of comic strips, and Mel
Ramos's brash pin-ups. Claes
Oldenburg, whose subjects include ice-cream cones and hamburgers, has been the major Pop art sculptor. John Wilmerding (
American Art, 1976) writes that Pop art ‘cannot be separated from the culmination of affluence and prosperity during the post-World-War-II era. America had become a ravenously consuming society, packaging art as well as other products, indulging in commercial manipulation, and celebrating exhibitionism, self-promotion, and instant success…Pop's mass-media orientation may further be related to the acceleration of uniformity in most aspects of national life, whether restaurants or regional dialects. Shared by all Americans were the principal preoccupations of Pop art—sex, the automobile, and food.’
In Britain, too, Pop art revelled in a new glossy prosperity following years of post-war austerity. British Pop was nurtured by the
Independent Group and the work that is often cited as the first fully-fledged Pop art image was produced under its auspices— Richard
Hamilton's collage
Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? (1956, Kunsthalle, Tübingen). However, British Pop art first made a major impact at the
Young Contemporaries exhibition in 1961 (at about the same time that American Pop art became a force). The artists in this exhibition included Derek
Boshier, David
Hockney, Allen
Jones,
R. B. Kitaj, and Peter
Phillips, who had all been students at the
Royal College of Art. In the same year the BBC screened Ken Russell's
Monitor film ‘Pop goes the Easel’, in which Peter
Blake was one of the featured artists. Although there are exceptions (notably the erotic sculptures of Allen Jones), British Pop art was generally less brash than American, expressing a more romantic view of the subject matter in a way that can now strike a note of nostalgia. Much of the imagery, however, came directly from the American world of pin-ups and pin ball machines.
Richard Hamilton defined Pop art as ‘popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, and Big Business’, and it was certainly a success on a material level, getting through to the public in a way that few modern movements do and attracting big-money collectors. However, it was scorned by many critics. Harold
Rosenberg, for example, described Pop 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.’
