Pop Art Movement History, Artwork, and Artists

Hard-edged compositions are a popular motif used to defuse the ‘painterly looseness’ of styles like Abstraction, Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism. Many Pop Art pieces are consequently made up of distinctive or fragmented shapes. Some artists would also satirise objects by enlarging them to almost comical proportions.

In many ways, the Pop art movement began as a form of academic inquiry. In 1952–55 a group of artists, architects, and design historians met regularly at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London to discuss disparate topics such as car styling or pulp magazines. The Independent Group, as they called themselves, were committed to developing a broad-based understanding of culture from its supposedly “high” forms to its popular ones. This philosophy informed the cerebral works of their main artist member, Richard Hamilton.

EDEN – The House of Art…

Modernist critics were horrified by the pop artists’ use of such ‘low’ subject matter and by their apparently uncritical treatment of it. In fact pop both took art into new areas of subject matter and developed new ways of presenting it in art and can be seen as one of the first manifestations of postmodernism. Pop artists cut up, used, reworked and threw together a whole variety of different pop culture references.

Claes Oldenburg and Pop Sculpture

Heading south to Miami, we find the Pérez Art Museum Miami, or PAMM if you’re into the whole brevity thing. SPACE FOUR ZERO You can actually have a conversation with the digital ghost of the eccentric artist. The museum also houses an artificial intelligence version of Dalí himself. Melting clocks, impossibly long-legged elephants, and enough symbolism to keep art students debating for centuries – it’s all here. Still in St. Pete (because why leave when the art’s this good?), we’re melting into the surreal world of Salvador Dalí.

KOREAN ART NOW: OUR HOME, OUR SPACE

Robert Rauscherberge was busy combining oil painting with found objects. In the case of both collages, they demonstrate how artists incorporated modern day imagery from popular culture to comment on said culture, as well as pushing boundaries while asking what could be considered art. Watch our video overview of the movement and read on to learn more about how did Pop Art emerge, who were the key pop artists, and what were their artistic aims and most iconic works. Pop Art artists took inspiration from advertising, pulp magazines, billboards, movies, television, comic strips, and shop windows for their humorous, witty and ironic works, which both can be seen as a celebration and a critique of popular culture.

It started a trend, now seen in many contemporary artworks, of using artwork to comment, critique, or reflect on society through insightful observation. Pop art artists employed bold colors from the primary color palette including vivid red, bright yellow and royal blue. They also used unexpected tones not found in nature, along with neon and fluorescents. Pop artists created art that was meant to immediately grab the viewer’s attention. At the MoMA in New York hangs Drowning Girl, a work using oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas. Without care to her perilous situation, and engulfing waves, her thought bubble says, “I don’t care!

It incorporated everyday objects into painting, sculpture, silkscreen, collage, and multimedia works. Emerging in the mid 1950s in Britain and late 1950s in America, pop art reached its peak in the 1960s. It began as a revolt against the dominant approaches to art and culture and traditional views on what art should be.

He is well known for his advertisements and creating artwork for pop culture icons such as commissions from The Beatles, Marilyn Monroe, and Elizabeth Taylor, among others.57 Another leading pop artist at that time was Keiichi Tanaami. Iconic characters from Japanese manga and anime have also become symbols for pop art, such as Speed Racer and Astro Boy. Japanese manga and anime also influenced later pop artists such as Takashi Murakami and his superflat movement. In 1952, a gathering of artists in London calling themselves the Independent Group began meeting regularly to discuss topics such as mass culture’s place in fine art, the found object, and science and technology.

But Andy Warhol’s silkscreens are the most well-known artworks to be repetitively produced. This style was employed by artists such as Jasper Johns, who made paintings depicting “things the mind already knows,” such as flags or numbers. Neo Dadaism in Pop art focused on the use of found or known objects in artwork. Pop Art is often produced at a low cost, and instead of creating a rare “masterpiece,” Pop Artists often mass-produced their artwork and made it a commodity. Los Angeles produced a different style of Pop art than other regions like New York. Items referencing Southern California lifestyle were prevalent, with images of surfboards and motorcycles.

It’s like the artists broke out of the creative jail and left their masterpieces behind. Inside, it’s a wonderland of cutting-edge contemporary art that’ll make your brain do somersaults. Inside, you’re greeted by Dalí’s enormous masterpieces that are trippier than a walk through the Everglades at midnight. It’s like someone took a blender to art history and poured out a perfectly curated smoothie of creativity.