Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the United Kingdom and the United States during the mid-to-late 1950s.Pop Art: A Brief History, MoMA LearningLivingstone, M., Pop Art: A Continuing History, New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1990 The movement presented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular and mass culture—including advertising, comics, product packaging, celebrities, and everyday consumer goods—into painting, sculpture, and printmaking. By elevating the banal, the kitsch, and the mass-produced to the status of high art, pop art blurred the boundaries between high and low culture. It is also associated with the artists' use of mechanical means of reproduction or rendering techniques. In pop art, material is sometimes visually removed from its known context, isolated, or combined with unrelated material.de la Croix, H.; Tansey, R., Gardner's Art Through the Ages, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1980.
The movement developed initially in Britain through artists such as Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton, who explored American consumer imagery and postwar media culture in collage and painting. In the United States, artists including Larry Rivers, Ray Johnson, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns laid important groundwork by incorporating everyday objects and commercial symbols into their work. By the early 1960s, figures such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Tom Wesselmann brought the movement to international prominence.
Pop art is associated with irony, ambiguity, and a critical awareness of consumer culture. While some works appear to celebrate the glossy surfaces and abundance of postwar capitalism, others question the homogenizing effects of mass production and media saturation. Widely seen as both a reaction against and an extension of abstract expressionism, pop art redirected attention to everyday imagery and commercial design. Through its embrace of found imagery and commercial aesthetics, pop art drew on precedents in Dada while anticipating later developments in postmodern art. By collapsing boundaries between elite and popular culture, originality and reproduction, and art and commodity, it reshaped the visual language of contemporary art.
Origins
The origins of pop art in North America developed differently from those in Great Britain. In the United States, pop art emerged as a reaction by artists; it marked a return to hard-edged composition and representational art. The artists employed impersonal, mundane reality, irony, and parody to "defuse" the personal symbolism and "painterly looseness" of abstract expressionism.Gopnik, A.; Varnedoe, K., High & Low: Modern Art & Popular Culture, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1990 In the U.S., some works by Larry Rivers, Alex Katz and Man Ray anticipated pop art.
By contrast, the origins of pop art in post-war Britain, while employing irony and parody, were more academic. British artists focused on the dynamic and paradoxical imagery of American pop culture as powerful, manipulative symbolic devices that were affecting whole patterns of life, while simultaneously improving the prosperity of a society. Early pop art in Britain was a matter of ideas fueled by American popular culture when viewed from afar. Similarly, pop art was both an extension and a repudiation of Dadaism. While pop art and Dadaism explored some of the same subjects, pop art replaced the destructive, satirical, and anarchic impulses of the Dada movement with a detached affirmation of the artifacts of mass culture. Among those artists in Europe seen as producing work leading up to pop art are: Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and Kurt Schwitters.
Proto-pop Although both British and American pop art began during the 1950s, Marcel Duchamp and others in Europe like Francis Picabia and Man Ray predate the movement; in addition there were some earlier American proto-pop origins which utilized "as found" cultural objects.Piper, David. The Illustrated History of Art, , p486-487. During the 1920s, American artists Patrick Henry Bruce, Gerald Murphy, Charles Demuth and Stuart Davis created paintings that contained pop culture imagery (mundane objects culled from American commercial products and advertising design), almost "prefiguring" the pop art movement.Wayne Craven, American Art: History and . p.464.
United Kingdom: the Independent Group
The Independent Group (IG), founded in London in 1952, is regarded as the precursor to the pop art movement.Arnason, H., History of Modern Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 1968. They were a gathering of young painters, sculptors, architects, writers and critics who were challenging prevailing modernist approaches to culture as well as traditional views of fine art. Their group discussions centered on pop culture implications from elements such as mass advertising, movies, product design, comic strips, science fiction and technology. At the first Independent Group meeting in 1952, co-founding member, artist and sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi presented a lecture using a series of collages titled Bunk! that he had assembled during his time in Paris between 1947 and 1949. This material of "found objects" such as advertising, comic book characters, magazine covers and various mass-produced graphics mostly represented American popular culture. One of the collages in that presentation was Paolozzi's I was a Rich Man's Plaything (1947), which includes the first use of the word "pop", appearing in a cloud of smoke emerging from a revolver. Following Paolozzi's seminal presentation in 1952, the IG focused primarily on the imagery of American popular culture, particularly mass advertising.
According to the son of John McHale, the term "pop art" was first coined by his father in 1954 in conversation with Frank Cordell, although other sources credit its origin to British critic Lawrence Alloway."Pop art", A Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Art, Ian Chilvers. Oxford University Press, 1998."Pop art", The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms, Michael Clarke, Oxford University Press, 2001. (Both versions agree that the term was used in Independent Group discussions by mid-1955.)
"Pop art" as a moniker was then used in discussions by IG members in the Second Session of the IG in 1955, and the specific term "pop art" first appeared in published print in the article "But Today We Collect Ads" by IG members Alison and Peter Smithson in Ark magazine in 1956.Alison and Peter Smithson, "But Today We Collect Ads", reprinted on page 54 in Modern Dreams The Rise and Fall of Pop, published by ICA and MIT, However, the term is often credited to British art critic/curator Lawrence Alloway for his 1958 essay titled The Arts and the Mass Media, even though the precise language he uses is "popular mass culture".Lawrence Alloway, "The Arts and the Mass Media," Architectural Design & Construction, February 1958. "Furthermore, what I meant by it then is not what it means now. I used the term, and also 'Pop Culture' to refer to the products of the mass media, not to works of art that draw upon popular culture. In any case, sometime between the winter of 1954–55 and 1957 the phrase acquired currency in conversation..."Klaus Honnef, Pop Art, Taschen, 2004, p. 6, Nevertheless, Alloway was one of the leading critics to defend the inclusion of the imagery of mass culture in the fine arts. Alloway clarified these terms in 1966, at which time pop art had already transited from art schools and small galleries to a major force in the artworld. But its success had not been in England. Practically simultaneously, and independently, New York City had become the hotbed for pop art.
In London, the annual Royal Society of British Artists (RBA) exhibition of young talent in 1960 first showed American pop influences. In January 1961, the most famous RBA-Young Contemporaries of all put David Hockney, the American R B Kitaj, New Zealander Billy Apple, Allen Jones, Derek Boshier, Joe Tilson, Patrick Caulfield, Peter Phillips, Pauline Boty and Peter Blake on the map; Apple designed the posters and invitations for both the 1961 and 1962 Young Contemporaries exhibitions. Hockney, Kitaj and Blake went on to win prizes at the John-Moores-Exhibition in Liverpool in the same year. Apple and Hockney traveled together to New York during the Royal College's 1961 summer break, which is when Apple first made contact with Andy Warhol – both later moved to the United States and Apple became involved with the New York pop art scene.
United States
Although pop art began in the early 1950s, in America it was given its greatest impetus during the 1960s. In an August 1962 review of an exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, The New York Times noted the emergence of what was then being called "Pop" or "Environmental" art within a survey of contemporary American work drawn from major Connecticut collections. The review highlighted Roy Lichtenstein's comic-strip imagery, James Rosenquist's billboard-derived painting, and Andy Warhol's repeated Campbell's soup cans. It characterized these developments not as passing provocations but as "big steps towards art that is socially to the point," signaling early critical recognition of pop art's challenge to Abstract Expressionism and its embrace of mass culture.
The term "pop art" was officially introduced in December 1962; the occasion was a "Symposium on Pop Art" organized by the Museum of Modern Art.Scherman, Tony. "When Pop Turned the Art World Upside Down." American Heritage 52.1 (February 2001), 68. By this time, American advertising had adopted many elements of modern art and functioned at a very sophisticated level. Consequently, American artists had to search deeper for dramatic styles that would distance art from the well-designed and clever commercial materials. As the British viewed American popular culture imagery from a somewhat removed perspective, their views were often instilled with romantic, sentimental and humorous overtones. By contrast, American artists, bombarded every day with the diversity of mass-produced imagery, produced work that was generally more bold and aggressive.
According to historian, curator and critic Henry Geldzahler, "Ray Johnson's collages Elvis Presley No. 1 and James Dean stand as the Plymouth Rock of the Pop movement."Geldzahler, Henry in Pop Art: 1955–1970 catalogue, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1985 Author Lucy Lippard wrote that "The Elvis ... and Marilyn Monroe [collages] ... heralded Warholian Pop."Lippard, Lucy in Ray Johnson: Correspondences catalogue, Wexner Center/Whitney Museum, 2000 Johnson worked as a graphic designer, and later became known as the father of mail art as the founder of his "New York Correspondence School," working small by stuffing clippings and drawings into envelopes rather than working larger like his contemporaries.Bloch, Mark. "An Illustrated Introduction to Ray Johnson 1927–1995", 1995 A note about the cover image in the January 1958 issue of Art News pointed out that "[Jasper] Johns' first one-man show ... places him with such better-known colleagues as Rauschenberg, Twombly, Kaprow and Ray Johnson".Author unknown. "(Table of contents, Untitled note about cover.)", Art News, vol. 56, no. 9, January 1958