A brief essay on Pop Art

For some reason I can't seem to log on to the My Course student intranet, so I'm going to post some essay pieces here instead. The first is on the subject of Pop Art, not one of my favourite art movements by any means (with the exception of Richard Hamilton's early stuff and some of the Japanese Pop movement, I really don't like Pop Art. I find that any value it had in terms of satire and commentary of popular celebrity and consumer culture has been completely undermined by the sheer popularity of it's most well-known exponents. Warhol and Lichtenstein have become consumer cliches in their own right and I find it very hard to look at artworks I'm too familiar with). But any, I digress...

Pop Art

Pop Art was an art movement beginning in the late 1950s in Britain and independently in the United States, so called because artists drew from the imagery of contemporary and retro popular culture. Inspired by the appropriative styles and collage used in Dadaism, the use of space and perspective of Cubism and contemporary lowbrow art (in the form of comic books, advertisements and other found objects), Pop Art drew from and later fed into popular culture, creating an unusually accessible modern art form.

American Pop Art was an express movement away from the abstract styles of Expressionism, Cubism and Dada, and artists focused heavily on figurative works. Two particularly famous examples are Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. Warhol is perhaps the artist most synonymous with Pop Art: his bold, iconic (and easily imitable) screenprints made him one of the most famous and recognisable artists of the 20^th century, with their use of bright colours, already recognisable subjects and minimal compositions are now frequently emulated and copied by other artists. Lichtenstein also chose to make artworks directly based on popular imagery. Best known for his large canvases based on 50s and 60s comic books, Lichtenstein provided commentary on the nature of art by creating carefully composed pieces that emulated the drawing style and printing techniques of these, already old-fashioned, comics.

In Britain, Pop Art drew more heavily from Dada, with frequent use of collage and direct appropriation of images to create sly, satirical pieces. Richard Hamilton is a particularly good example of the difference between American Pop Art and that of Britain; his Just what is it about the homes of today that makes them so different, so appealing? is not only based on imagery from popular culture, it is entirely built up from such images, cut directly from magazines and advertisements. Other contemporary artists such as Peter Blake also made use of collage as a visual style, Blake’s On the Balcony, for example, has the appearance of collage but is in fact entirely painted, while he is most famous for his collage-heavily album artwork for the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album and the Band Aid single.

Both Blake and Warhol highlight Pop Art’s unusual place in popular culture. Working at a time when popular music and film were moving in new directions, Pop Art’s satirical look at popular and celebrity culture made its artists far more accessible to mass consumers, and their blurring of the boundaries between lowbrow and fine art lead to an increasingly large role in pop culture itself. With Blake creating artwork for pop music sleeves, and Warhol producing film and music from his studio and trendy hang-out The Factory, Pop artists began to feed work back into the popular consciousness that they had originally drawn from.

Though the first wave of pop art was waning by the mid 1970s, its original artists continued to produce works to the present day, and Neo-Pop movements have appeared in the 1980s and more recently in the last few years through artists like Julian Opie. Independent Pop Art movements have developed across Europe, and significantly in Japan where artists fused the ethos of Western Pop art with their own native popular culture, resulting in artworks that draw heavily from traditional prints, anime and manga styles as well as the contemporary “superflat” movement which satirises consumer culture with its flattened perspectives.

Somewhat ironically, Pop Art has become a retro consumer product in itself. Lichtenstein-inspired comic prints have become very popular in fashion and home décor and many home décor and greetings card companies now use retro imagery similar to that utilised by Pop Artists for comic effect. Warhol’s famous multi-coloured screenprints are frequently the subject of pastiche by artists today, particularly in the digital age, as they are easy to produce and to subvert with the inclusion of contemporary “icons”. The trendy image of the Pop Artists of the 1960s has come to define how well-known contemporary artists are seen: in the 1990s the Brit Art movement became synonymous with the mystique of “Cool Britannia”, just as Pop Art had become part of “Swinging London” thirty years previously.