Written by Hilary Dufour
Popular culture has inundated the individual with myriad images revolving around notions of fame, fortune, sex appeal and consumerism. The pop art movement has drawn from this truth and created art which responds to and mimics popular culture. From pop culture, comes pop art. In some ways they are one in the same and in other ways they are drastically different.
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| Edouardo Paolozzi, "I was a Rich Man's Plaything" |
"Pop Art and the Cult of Cool"
The history of the pop art movement is both rich and diverse. On the other side of the Atlantic in Great Britain, Pop art was emerging in the 1950s. Members of the Independent Group met to discuss topics of Western culture including the significance or misappropriation of mass culture in fine art, as well as science, technology, and cinema. One member, Edouardo Paolozzi was the first to incorporate the word “pop” into his artwork. In his "I was a Rich Man’s Plaything," from 1947, various popular icons and imagery are collaged to form an exploration and representation of popular culture, while remaining detached or “emotionally distant” from such culture. In the article, "Pop Art and the Cult of ‘Cool’," it is said that Paolozzi’s piece exemplifies pop art’s incorporation of “subjects like sex, romantic love, and patriotism” which “are all treated with exaggerated superficiality, and are thereby deliberately made to seem trite and shallow”. These words, “trite and shallow” are integral to the creation of pop art.
American Pop Art Movement
In the United States, the work of Jasper Johns anticipated the American pop art movement. Johns’ art incorporated references to “things the mind already knows”, as he put it, which included flags, letters, and numbers. With the use of everyday objects as subject, Johns questions notions of representation and meaning in art.
Referencing and incorporating different aspects of pop culture was essential to the pop art movement. At the heart of the pop movement was the idea that anything from culture could be borrowed and that no object was any more important than another. Comic books were one source from which artists borrowed. Images by the prominent artist Roy Lichtenstein came from mass-produced comic book images.
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| Roy Lichtenstein, "Hopeless", 1963 |
Andy Warhol's Icons
Another famous pop artist, Andy Warhol, replicated a variety of iconic images to create art that spoke to notions of both consumerism and aesthetics. In the 1960s, he began silk-screening portraits of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe. His Campbell soup can series also examined the prevalence of certain images within pop culture. As aforementioned, there was no hierarchy in what artists could borrow, which Andy Warhol asserted in this series. With his Campbell’s series he sought to blend the boundaries between high art and low or “popular” culture.
Pop art’s blurring of the boundaries between high and low art, and its incorporation of popular culture into art has had an inconceivable impact on the art world. So-called Lowbrow art, which originated in L.A. in the 60s, also seeks to critique popular culture and stand in opposition to fine art. Further connections can be made to urban art and graffiti art which blur the boundaries between fine art and “low” art. Many of the artists displayed at Thumbprint Gallery fall under one of these categories and entice the viewer to look at art with a more inquisitive eye.
You can view and purchase works by Thumbprint Gallery artists at our online store here.
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