Pop art
Pop art is an influential art movement that emerged in the mid-20th century, characterized by its focus on popular culture and consumerism. It originated from earlier artistic practices that incorporated everyday objects and imagery, with key figures like Marcel Duchamp and Stuart Davis paving the way. Pop artists celebrated and critiqued the affluence of American society during the 1960s, drawing inspiration from advertising, film, and mass media. Prominent artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein utilized commercial techniques, including silk screening and Ben-Day dots, to create works that mirrored the mass production of consumer goods.
This movement blurred the lines between fine art and popular culture, reinterpreting familiar objects—like Campbell's soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles—as subjects of artistic expression. Pop art also reflected the urban landscape, replacing traditional depictions of nature with imagery of shopping malls, billboards, and celebrities. As a result, it encouraged viewers to question the impact of consumerism on their lives and perceptions. Although pop art's prominence waned by the 1970s, its legacy continued to influence both the art world and everyday culture, fostering a lasting connection between art and the symbols of consumer society.
Pop art
An art form reflecting the popular culture of the affluent postwar Western world. It employed the symbols and methods of a consumerist society to celebrate and criticize the culture created by mass production and consumption.
Origins and History
In the early twentieth century, several artists used commonplace images and objects in their works. For example, Marcel Duchamp displayed “ready-mades,” including a snow shovel and typewriter cover, as art objects. Fernand Leger filled his canvases with ordinary, everyday objects such as a pair of trousers. American artist Stuart Davis produced paintings containing commercial images such as a pack of cigarettes or a soap box. This celebration of popular culture in the early part of the twentieth century provided a precedent for the pop art movement.
Pop art celebrated the popular cultural icons of the United States’ affluent consumer society, often called the “ad/mass society.” These icons included images from advertising, billboards, and other commercial imagery; from film, television, and popular publications; and from symbols of the 1960s lifestyle such as cars, food, and stores. Pop artists embraced the techniques of this mass production/mass consumption culture by replicating mechanization and standardization with art that was either machine-made or appeared to be machine-made. Using both repetition and uniformity, pop artists reflected the technological society of the 1960’s with their commonplace images and motifs.
Ordinary Objects and Stars
As Americans in the 1960’s turned to the supermarket and shopping malls for access to the products of their affluent society, pop artists such as Andy Warhol,Roy Lichtenstein, Wayne Theibaud, Claes Oldenburg, and Tom Wesselmann, used subjects such as Campbell soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, and other brand-name food products as repetitive or large-scale images in paintings. These depictions of the ready-made objects of an assembly-line world were direct and simple images immediately identifiable by viewers. The mechanical process of silk screening, used by several pxx op artists, yielded works that replicated the processes of mass production; many artists deliberately sought to create a machine-made art for the machine-made age. The serial imagery of several pop artists, who created a canvas full of repeating images, hinted strongly at a society of nearly identical mass-produced products from foods to automobiles to mass media publications, releases, and broadcasts.
Pop art also celebrated the luminaries of popular culture. Pop artists focused on a new set of heroes and heroines, including Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, for the affluent 1960’s. Employing repetitive, mechanically produced images based on the techniques used in films, magazines, or television, they rendered the men and women of popular culture as mass-produced objects intended for the mass marketplace. With their bright colors, sharp edges, and photograph-like images, these works seemed little different from the original popular culture product or mass media advertisements that served as a source of imagery. The distinction between popular culture and fine art was blurred by pop art.
New Techniques and Materials
This blurring of popular and fine art was apparent in the techniques used by many pop artists. For example, Lichtenstein’s signature Ben-Day dots, based on industrial printing technology, became as much a subject of his paintings and sculptures as the images he presented. Warhol used a silk-screen technique to replicate images. James Rosenquist used billboard painting styles to produce sharp-edged, large-scale images that mirrored the slick, glossy advertisements that permeated ad/mass culture. For these artists, process gained equal footing with subject in their work, which celebrated and criticized Americans’ affluent lifestyle.
Many pop artists also used the materials and products of ttheir time to create their works. Traditional oil paints gave way to bright, intense acrylic paints. Hand-drawn images or figures became photographs or dots of color merged into photograph-like images. Other materials, among them metal, cardboard, plaster, vinyl, and plastic, appeared in pop art. The distinction between painting and sculpture dimmed as artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jim Dine used actual store-bought products in their newly conceived “combine paintings,” attaching these three-dimensional objects to their canvases. Everyday, ordinary products became worthy subjects of or part of paintings or sculpture.
The Ordinary as Art
As an art movement celebrating the urban landscape and lifestyle, pop art mirrored the great urban and suburban growth of the 1960’s. Artists created works that grew out of a lifestyle of shopping at the mall and supermarkets, going to films, watching television, and driving around in a car. Traditional artists celebrated classical heroes and heroines, idyllic landscapes, and historical moments, but pop artists replaced images of nature trees, mountains, rivers, and seascapes with urban images of skyscrapers, billboards and other commercial signs, store-front window displays, supermarkets, and pop stars. The mundane scenes of everyday urban life became noble; the hero on horseback became a Brillo soap pad box or a giant hamburger that hinted at food from a drive-in restaurant. A bowl of fruit became an item that symbolized a 1960s kitchen: a Campbell’s soup can. The commonplace features of ordinary people and their lives were a rich source of subjects for pop art. Using them celebrated the richness and comfort of modern affluence.
Through larger-than-life images, subjects that were photographs and symbols of the ad/mass, and common materials, pop artists grabbed the attention of the viewing public. These artists sought to criticize as well as praise the affluent American culture that had developed. Repetition in their art touched on the banality of experiences and images in a consumerist culture. Large-scale reproductions of ordinary objects asked a viewer to question the impact of these objects on people’s lives. The use of imagery from advertising, television, and film raised the issue of the real versus the created image; was the public misled by the larger-than-life persona of a Hollywood star or the value placed on celebrity status? In some ways, these pop artists were asking their viewers whether there was any depth or lasting meaning to the symbols of affluence that surrounded them and whether the technological culture had transformed humans into machines of consumption. Their art was meant to challenge as well as to comfort its viewers.
Impact
Just as pop art imitated life through the symbols of the 1960’s, so life in the 1960’s imitated pop art. The imagery of this art movement appeared on clothing, various mass-produced products, posters, and advertisements. This very process of life imitating an art that imitated life attests the popular success and impact of pop art. Its presence was felt within the art world, transformed by its use of vernacular imagery that celebrated an egalitarian and technological culture. Almost any object became a possible subject of art. Outside the art world, ordinary citizens recognized and related to the objects and lifestyles celebrated in pop art. Pop art played a key role in making Americans evaluate and appreciate the affluent culture in which they lived.
Subsequent Events
Pop art’s influence waned in the 1970’s as a backlash developed against the world of comfort, mass production, and technological supremacy. Members of the counterculture debated the value of the ad/mass society and the art it produced. However, by the 1980’s, some artists had returned to the imagery of pop art, and their works, along with those of many other artists, provided audiences with a spectrum of styles. Pop art images remained in the marketplace on the canvas, in sculpture, and in mass merchandise. In the 1980’s and 1990’s, consumers wore clothing with ad/mass images such as trademarks, designer names, and celebrity photos. This visual and cultural linkage to the icons of a consumerist culture is, perhaps, pop art’s most lasting influence.
Additional Information
Sidra Stich’s Made in USA: An Americanization in Modern Art, the 1950’s and 1960’s (1987) is a thorough treatment of pop art in the United States. Other treatments of pop art and its place in the art of the 1960’s include Lucy R. Lippard’s Pop Art (1966); Lawrence Alloway’s American Pop Art (1974); and Nicholas Calas and Elena Calas’s Icons and Images of the Sixties (1971).