Pop art: characteristics, artists and main works

The pop art, known in Spanish as pop art, is a plastic movement that had its origins in the 1950s. It was born between Great Britain and the United States, but it was the latter that became the standard-bearer of the movement. However, pop art generated a shock wave throughout the world, both in Europe and in Latin America, Asia and Oceania.

Pop art is contextualized in the full process of shaping the consumer society, whose impulse definitive took place after the Second World War and the arrival of television, the new invader of the homes.

This artistic style was born as an attempt to make an art that took into account the universe of symbols and topics of massive interest, it is that is, the "popular" symbols to which the cultural elite seemed to turn its back and deny its mobilizing penetration into the imaginary collective.

Characteristics of pop art

Inspiration from mass culture

If the ancients had represented the image of the world as they knew and conceived it in their works, it was the obligation of contemporary artists to do the same. Pop artists would go to those everyday objects that were becoming the new symbols of "civilization": media idols, political figures, mass-produced objects, comic strips (comics), posters, packaging and all kinds of symbolic images (signs of traffic,

collages, etc.).

Extension of the notion of beauty to the repertoire of pop symbols

The pop art He understood that even the objects of mass culture could contain elements of beauty, and not just the Venus and Madonnas of antiquity. Of course, this will not stop being a provocation for the intellectual environment, an aspect that pop artists take advantage of very well in their favor.

Decontextualization

One of the strategies of pop art it was to borrow the objects and decontextualize them. For example, taking a soup can, a famous painting or a photograph out of its context, intervening it and transforming it into a work or a new work. Something similar had been done by the Dadaists with their technique ready made since Marcel Duchamp created his famous Fountain: an intervened urinal with the artist's signature, under the pseudonym R. Mutt, and that it was presented as a museum work.

Denial of virtuosity

These artists did not advocate virtuosity as a value. With this, pop art broke with the idea of ​​a work of art as a result of a complex, long and difficult process, which favored the principle of multiple reproduction.

For this reason, they implemented absolutely unusual techniques in the field of fine arts, such as screen printing, comic with its vignettes and line style, some advertising and mass production techniques, as well as collages and photographs.

Some artists were more radical and produced happenings and interactive shows, dealing a blow against collecting and the commodification of art.

Incongruity

The universe of symbols that pop art offered was not very easy for the intellectuals of the old school to assimilate, and, in addition, pop artists did not have a single position in relation to what they represented, which made it difficult to things. Therefore, their purposes were not necessarily clear. Did they criticize consumption? Did they validate the consumption? Did they take advantage of the circumstances? Thus they created seemingly incongruous and provocative images.

Humor

As it was not intended to be an intellectual art, pop art was also a movement full of humor and complicit winks at the viewer.

Far from the infatuated positions of the great theorists and intellectuals of the medium, the pop artists ironic and laughed at the surrounding order. Perhaps it was a different way of criticizing.

Provocation

All of this made pop art provocative, provocative, controversial. For example, by questioning the idea of ​​originality, they also questioned the superiority of the creative genius, a figure to whom tribute has been paid since the Renaissance. They also questioned the role of critics, art historians, the concept of museums, selection criteria, the principles of museography ...

But beyond everything that makes the pop art, it is evident that nothing arises by spontaneous generation, and that, before pop artists formulated this aesthetic program, previous generations were creating the conditions for this authentic revolt of the signs artistic. Let's see what his background was and what relationships pop art had in the creative context of the 1950s.

Pop art background

The influences of pop art they can be found in currents such as Dadaism, which emerged in the first wave of avant-garde movements. It was a cultural movement that questioned the positivist rational order and that, particularly in painting, stood out for having proposed new techniques such as the ready-made, a technique that consisted of taking everyday objects, intervening them and transforming them into objects suitable for exhibition in a museum, without hiding their characteristics or origin.

Closer in time, a key direct driver was the Independent Group, known by the acronym of its English name IG (Independent Group).

The IG emerged in 1952 at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London and was active until 1955. During this period Britain, like other fully industrialized countries in Europe, was experiencing the growth of a different urban popular culture, after the rationing and austerity of the second war world.

Many artists participated in this group. However, it was the Italian Edouardo Paolozzi who became a founding reference of the pop art after the first IG session. In this, Paolozzi projected several collages that he had made from magazines by means of an opaque projector. The first image was the collageI was a Rich Man's Plaything (I was a rich man's toy), in which the word "pop" is used for the first time, from which the movement would take its name.

In this context, the IG debated for the first time in the artistic milieu the problem of mass culture and its implications in the definition of culture as it had been conceived until then. For them, this also forced them to rethink the current notion of art.

At the same time, in the United States crucial changes were taking place in the world of culture, breaking with everything imagined up to now, without the direction of those impulses.

In this sense, a vitally important precedent for pop art was constituted by the famous work 4'33 '', by the composer John Milton Cage. This work consisted of the execution of a score with a duration of 4 minutes and 33 seconds, whose only written indication was the word “tacet” (silence).

According to the interpretation of some, Cage's proposal was aimed at the perception of environmental noise produced by the public as a work of musical art. Without a doubt, it was an absolute revolution, where music had taken the lead in an unexpected way, questioning the fundamental subject of its discipline. What would the plastic arts do?

To begin with, they would react against the intellectualization of art and the evasive character of consecrated artists in the face of invasive contemporary reality, traits this generation attributed especially to Jackson's abstract expressionism Pollock. Thus, the new generation of artists would appropriate Cage's idea: to eliminate the distance between art and life. Let's see why and what they did it for.

Why and for what was pop art born?

The characteristics of pop art that we have exposed show that this movement had a deep meaning, contrary to the sentences that accuse it of being superficial.

This movement can be seen as an art without compromise, but sometimes this statement can be unfair. It is true that it has a strong visual load, it is true that it is not scandalized by the symbols of mass culture, but there is also a sense at the bottom of it.

In the very particular case of US artists. They were interested in investigating the ultimate essence of North Americanism in the midst of this turn of the screw that meant the passage to mass society. Along with this, in some way they also tried to rediscover the figurative painting that abstract expressionism had hidden behind the wardrobe.

But in general terms, it was clear to pop artists around the world that irony allowed them to show that the Materialism and vulgarity participated in the hegemonic order that the mass camp established between 1950 and 1970.

At the same time, they recognized what the new symbols had of a clear and continuous manifestation of values. cultures in transformation, which many times allowed them to observe the new icons without making judgments of value.

In a broad sense, through the incorporation of the symbols of the consumer society, pop art not only expanded the repertoire of the iconographic themes of art, but that set a position on two things: the reordering of consumer society and the refusal of the intellectual elites to recognize that this phenomenon ran through the whole of society. culture.

Thus, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Mao Tse Tung, Superman or Batman were so “cultural” and worthy of attention for their contemporary world as the repertoire of aphrodites, venus, adonis, apollos, virgins, saints, water carriers, shepherds, landscapes, kings and personalities for the century XVI.

Top artists

Andy Warhol (1928-1987)

He was an important North American plastic artist, illustrator, and filmmaker. He was responsible for applying marketing and advertising principles to the sphere of art. With this, he paved the way for the development of pop art.

He coined one of the most famous phrases in the history of art, which today is fulfilled thanks to new information technologies: "In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes." Among his most outstanding works we can mention the series Campbel soup cans and the silkscreen portraits of public figures such as Marylin Monroe, Mao Tse Tung, and himself.

See also 7 iconic works by Andy Warhol.

Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997)

Painter, graphic artist and sculptor. He applied the comic technique to conventional plastic arts, thereby achieving recognition of the new visual culture in the art world. He also used other techniques such as screen printing and collage. His works are particularly famous The kiss Y Wham !.

Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008)

He began his career as a painter under the aegis of Abstract Expressionism, but halfway through his life he began to explore the language and possibilities of pop art, until it becomes one of its most important representatives. He stood out with the combination of unusual materials in the plastic arts, which could even involve combining painting with sculpture, engraving photography and performance. This technique became known as combine. Among his most famous works are: the series Factum and the series Retroactive.

Jasper Johns (1930)

He is an American plastic artist in which both the elements of pop art and abstract expressionism, minimalism and neo-Dadaism are visible. His favorite technique has been encaustic. In a chapter of The Simpsons Called "Mom and Pop Art" or "The Art of Dad and Mom" ​​(in its Spanish-American translation), Jasper Johns appears as one of the artists with whom Homer befriends. At the end of the chapter, he is seen stealing materials for his works. Among the best known pieces of him we can mention Three flags Y Diana with four faces.

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