I SEE ART: Pop art

Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art. Pop removes the material from its context and isolates the object, or combines it with other objects, for contemplation.

pop art is widely interpreted as a reaction to the then-dominant ideas of abstract expressionism, as well as an expansion upon them. Much of pop art is considered incongruent, as the conceptual practices that are often used make it difficult for some to readily comprehend.

Pop art (like that of Andy Warhol) generally consists of the following:
-Bright, quirky colors that stand out, sometimes neon.
-Ordinary objects being turned into art.
-Four paintings of the same picture using four different hues.
-Focusing on the contours, shapes, and basics of a picture

The term Pop art was first used by English critic, Lawrence Alloway in 1958 in an edition of Architectural Digest. He was describing all post-war work centered on consumerism and materialism, and that rejected the psychological allusions of Abstract Expressionism. An attempt to bring art back into American daily life, it rejected abstract painting because of its sophisticated and elite nature. Pop Art shattered the divide between the commercial arts and the fine arts. http://wwar.com/masters/movements/pop_art.html

Richard Hamilton’s collage Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? (1956) is considered by some critics and historians to be the first work of Pop Art. The piece has all the human senses cast in various modes; the purpose of the picture was to “provoke acute awareness of the sensory functions in an environmental situation”.

Andy Warhol was a central figure in the pop art movement. His early paintings show images taken from cartoons and advertisements, hand-painted with paint drips.

Robert Indiana was using distinctive imagery drawing on commercial art approaches blended with existentialism, that gradually moved toward what Indiana calls “sculptural poems”. Indiana’s work often consists of bold, simple, iconic images, especially numbers and short words like “EAT”, “HUG”, and “LOVE”. One of the best known works by Indiana is Love Rising (1968)

Famous pop art artist:

Andy Warhol

David Hockney

Jasper Johns

Keith Haring

Peter Max

Richard Hamilton

Tom Wesselmann

Wayne Thiebaud

modern pop art

Kevin Cherry. I like how he used the black backgroud with snatchy edges to separate the elements. The colour contrast, bold typeface, drips are all nice.