Pop Art

"The term first appeared in Britain during the 1950s and referred to the interest of a number of artists in the images of mass media, advertising, comics and consumer products. The 1950s were a period of optimism in Britain following the end of war-time rationing, and a consumer boom took place. Influenced by the art seen in Eduardo Paolozzi's 1953 exhibition Parallel between Art and Life at the Institute for Contemporary Arts, and by American artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, British artists such as Richard Hamilton and the Independent Group aimed at broadening taste into more popular, less academic art. Hamilton helped organize the 'Man, Machine, and Motion' exhibition in 1955, and 'This is Tomorrow' with its landmark image Just What is it that makes today's home so different, so appealing? (1956). Pop Art therefore coincided with the youth and pop music phenomenon of the 1950s and '60s, and became very much a part of the image of fashionable, 'swinging' London. Peter Blake, for example, designed album covers for Elvis Presley and the Beatles and placed film stars such as Brigitte Bardot in his pictures in the same way that Warhol was immortalizing Marilyn Monroe in the USA. Pop art came in a number of waves, but all its adherents - Joe Trilson, Richard Smith, Peter Phillips, David Hockney and R.B. Kitaj - shared some interest in the urban, consumer, modern experience."

Pop Art is a movement that began in Germany in the 1950s, but had its most famous practitioners--at least in this country--in Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Both used ads and comics for inspiration; the latter is most famous for his work mimicking comic books beginning in 1961. Of course, Bizet borrowed folk tunes in composing Carmen. Greek statues exist mainly because of Roman copies. Renaissance means “rebirth;” fifteenth century art and architecture copied from the past

Not all artists appreciated the fact that Lichtenstein copied their work, despite the fact that comic book artists had been doing it for years, the least talented ones lifting the work of better-paid strip artists like Milton Caniff, Alex Raymond and Hal Foster. (In the comic book world, copying another’s art was called either a “swipe” or an “homage,” depending on intent.) Comic book artists may have resented the fact that while they got $50 a page for their work, Lichtenstein was commanding gallery prices of $50,000 for his--and had the wherewithal to hire as many as five assistants at one time! Lichtenstein mostly abandoned comic books as a source for inspiration after 1964, but returned to comic motifs toward the end of his career in the 1990s. (I suspect this reflected the prices that "comic book" paintings commanded relative to other paintings he did during the interim.)

For more information about Pop Art CLICK HERE