Pop art,

art in which commonplace objects (such as comic strips, soup cans, road signs, and hamburgers) were used as subject matter and were often physically incorporated in the work. The Pop art movement was largely a British and American cultural phenomenon of the late 1950s and '60s and was named by the art critic Lawrence Alloway in reference to the prosaic iconography of its painting and sculpture. Works by such Pop artists as the Americans Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Tom Wesselman, James Rosenquist, and Robert Indiana and the Britons David Hockney and Peter Blake, among others, were characterized by their portrayal of any and all aspects of popular culture that had a powerful impact on contemporary life; their iconography--taken from television, comic books, movie magazines, and all forms of advertising--was presented emphatically and objectively, without praise or condemnation but with overwhelming immediacy, and by means of the precise commercial techniques used by the media from which the iconography itself was borrowed. Pop art represented an attempt to return to a more objective, universally acceptable form of art after the dominance in both the United States and Europe of the highly personal Abstract Expressionism. It was also iconoclastic, rejecting both the supremacy of the "high art" of the past and the pretensions of other contemporary avant-garde art. Pop art became a cultural event because of its close reflection of a particular social situation and because its easily comprehensible images were immediately exploited by the mass media. Although the critics of Pop art described it as vulgar, sensational, nonaesthetic, and a joke, its proponents (a minority in the art world) saw it as an art that was democratic and nondiscriminatory, bringing together both connoisseurs and untrained viewers.

Pop art was a descendant of Dada (q.v.), a nihilistic movement current in the 1920s that ridiculed the seriousness of contemporary Parisian art and, more broadly, the political and cultural situation that had brought war to Europe. Marcel Duchamp, the champion of Dada in the United States, who tried to narrow the distance between art and life by celebrating the mass-produced objects of his time, was the most influential figure in the evolution of Pop art. Other 20th-century artists who influenced Pop art were Stuart Davis, Gerard Murphy, and Fernand Léger, all of whom depicted in their painting the precision, mass-production, and commercial materials of the machine-industrial age. The immediate predecessors of the Pop artists were Jasper Johns, Larry Rivers, and Robert Rauschenberg, American artists who in the 1950s painted flags, beer cans, and other similar objects, though with a painterly, expressive technique.

Some of the more striking forms that Pop art took were Roy Lichtenstein's stylized reproductions of comic strips using the colour dots and flat tones of commercial printing; Andy Warhol's meticulously literal paintings and silk-screen prints of soup-can labels, soap cartons, and rows of soft-drink bottles; Claes Oldenburg's soft plastic sculptures of objects such as bathroom fixtures, typewriters, and gigantic hamburgers; Tom Wesselman's "Great American Nudes," flat, direct paintings of faceless sex symbols; and George Segal's constructed tableaux featuring life-sized plaster-cast figures placed in actual environments (e.g., lunch counters and buses) retrieved from junkyards.

Most Pop artists aspired to an impersonal, urbane attitude in their works. Some examples of Pop art, however, were subtly expressive of social criticism--for example, Oldenburg's drooping objects and Warhol's monotonous repetitions of the same banal image have an undeniably disturbing effect--and some, such as Segal's mysterious, lonely tableaux, are overtly expressionistic.

American Pop art tended to be emblematic, anonymous, and aggressive; English Pop, more subjective and referential, expressed a somewhat romantic view of Pop culture fostered perhaps by England's relative distance from it. English Pop artists tended to deal with technology and popular culture primarily as themes, even metaphors; some American Pop artists actually seemed to live these ideas. Warhol's motto, for example, was, "I think everybody should be a machine," and he tried in his art to produce works that a machine would have made.

Pop art was not taken seriously by the public, but it found critical acceptance as a form of art suited to the highly technological, mass-media oriented society of Western countries.

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