Pop art is a direction in art based on objects of mass culture and aimed at entertainment, commerce, and not at the search for deep meaning, philosophy and spirituality. The leading role in the development of the direction was played by: advertising, fashion, trends, style icons, various means of popularization and commercial promotion. Pop art was a reaction to the seriousness of abstract art and other art styles of the 20th century. The style is called one of the offshoots of avant-garde art.
History of style development
It was one of the most significant and influential artistic movements in painting and other art movements of the 20th century, characterized by a specific choice of themes and methods taken from popular popular culture. The style is aimed at a wide audience, as it uses popular images. Thanks to its accessibility and simplicity, pop art was popular.
Symbolism as a style in painting
The movement was founded in the 1950s and peaked in the 1960s. The birthplace of pop art is Great Britain, but the movement reached its greatest development in the USA, where New York became the capital of this cultural trend. The founders and most famous creators of pop art were Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns.
Independent group
The first steps of the new style in painting were associated with the activities of the "Independent Group" of artists and architects, founded in 1952 in London. They were the first to apply modern technologies to create canvases with the leading motifs of mass and urban folk culture. American culture became the basis for the study. Pioneers of style E. Paolozzi and R. Hamilton studied the psychological influences of mass culture, its meaning, linguistic content. First of all, they were interested in the methods of industrial advertising, modern technologies for making advertising, and the technique of creating collages.
art deco painting style
This is tomorrow
In 1956, the exhibition "This is Tomorrow" was held. The painters presented to the public pictures in the style of pop art, which depicted Hollywood stars, shots from famous movies with magnification. It was after the exhibition that many graduates of the art school joined the movement, inspired by the new style. 
USA
In the US, the style developed and became popularized. Here, much attention was paid to the aestheticization of the banal - packaging, consumer goods. The essence of American pop art: the objects that people consume make representatives of different social strata equal to each other. Thus, pop art is the art of social equality. 
Like a term
The term used to define style appeared in 1955-1957, thanks to L. Alloway, a British critic. The very author of the concept was surprised by the fact that the term began to be used to define a whole cultural movement. Alloway himself was referring to products that have a commercial purpose, belonging to the elements of the mass media.
Abstractionism as a style in painting
Artists
The most famous representatives of the direction:
Keith Garing
New York-based artist known for caricatures. His work was influenced by the art of graffiti. 
David Hockney
Considered one of the most famous English artists of the 20th century. Hockney was one of the leaders in the development of pop art in the UK. 
Jasper Johns
Known for paintings of the American flag. One of the most famous works is Numbers in Color. 
Roy Lichtenstein
One of the famous creators of comics. 
Wayne Thiebaud
He became famous thanks to paintings depicting cakes, pastries, toys. 
Andy Warhole
The most famous creator in the style of pop art. Recognizable through the use of repetitive portraits and vibrant hues in the work.
Features of works in the style of pop art
We use images and icons that are popular in the modern world. These are portraits of celebrities, movie and music stars, items such as soft drinks, comic books, and any other emblems and products that are popular in the commercial world.
- The painting uses bright colors, the technique of creating collages, combines several logically unrelated objects in one image.
- Pop art canvases are hard to miss in the interior - they will become a bright accent in a room decorated in a modern style. Pop art style involves the use of various textures.
- The picture may include inscriptions, slogans, mottos - it resembles an advertising poster.
- To create works, photo printing techniques, combinations with real objects, and design were used.
- Aesthetic ideals were borrowed from popular culture, popularized by the media.
- The artists borrowed techniques from industrial advertising.
Dadaism as a style in painting
The style has been repeatedly criticized. In 1962, the Museum of Modern Art in New York held a symposium on pop art. The well-known critic H. Kramer insisted that it is necessary to resist the development of pop art, since it popularizes banality, vulgarity, and bad taste. According to the critic, pop art is just an advertisement that people try to dress up as an art form.
According to another critic, S. Kunitsa, pop art is a product of propaganda, and is aimed at forming a conformist society pursuing purely consumer goals. All the symbols and slogans, according to Kunits, turned advertising posters into pseudo art.
The goal of pop art, which the artists invested in their work, was to return to reality, from which abstractionists retreated. The main link of creativity was the subject associated with industrial culture, cinema, print media, television.
Now by the term "pop art" we mean four portraits of Marilyn Monroe in acid colors, or any other pictures like this. Someone will also remember huge canvases with images in the style of comics. But few people can explain what pop art really is. However, the history of the pop art movement is very interesting. Representatives of this direction are the same as their offspring: strange, but attractive in their own way.
The beginning of pop art history
It was the end of the 50s. In those years, in order to be considered an intellectual and connoisseur of art, it was enough to look at a picture for some time, and eventually draw some kind of “profound” conclusion. And in that amazing period, everyone was a connoisseur: after all, the main direction of that time was abstract expressionism.
What was he like? Frankly speaking, strokes, strokes, drops of paint on a large canvas. And in all this people tried to discern the hidden meaning. Naturally, staring at how someone spilled paint on the canvas will sooner or later get bored, which, in fact, happened.
Pop art originated in England in 1952 and its first representatives were three students of King's College. But now you are unlikely to find information about them, because this art direction has gained real popularity in America. One of the first works in the style of pop art was the collage "What makes our homes today so different, so attractive?".
As you can see, the artistic value of the collage is rather controversial; it can hardly be attributed to high art. Nevertheless, it was a kind of statement, a protest against modern art. And it worked. Pop art began to have new and new artists who brought something of their own to this direction. As a result, by the end of the 1970s, when pop art came to an end in America, its phenomenon had already spread in England, Europe, and even a little in the Soviet Union. True, in the latter it was not official, and over time, all admirers and creators of pop art paintings left the country.
pop art features
The peculiarity of pop art is revealed in its name: pop (popular) - popular; art - art. In short, it is an art in which the emphasis is on the little things that everyone can find in their surroundings. Supporters of this movement tried to return materiality and tangibility to art. They drew inspiration from modern life, their environment, and everyday life of ordinary Americans.
They did it, each in their own way. So, for example, pop art can include both collages like the one we showed above, and paintings with comic art. Some transferred photographs to huge silk canvases. Some painted flat women surrounded by almost three-dimensional household items. Some cut holes in the picture and put their TVs in them (no, this is not a joke, there will be examples below). In pop art, everyone brought something of their own, and therefore this direction is so diverse and ambiguous.
Representatives of pop art
Below we will talk about the brightest and most significant representatives of the pop art movement.
1 Andy Warhol
"Diptych Marilyn", E. Warhol
The same Andy Warhol who painted Marilyn Monroe. By the way, he "painted" not only her, but also other famous personalities. In addition to drawing celebrities, he also became famous for his painting of two hundred cans of soup. Which, by the way, brought him a huge amount of money. Actually, all the paintings brought him huge profits, because 50-80 copies were printed daily, all year round. He portrayed everything: canned goods, celebrities, photos of car accidents, portraits of criminals and much more. And they bought it all.
By the way, Warhol was also the director who shot the 24-hour film. This film, however, was without a special plot: the camera simply filmed a sleeping person.
2 Roy Lichtenstein
“M-Maybe”, R. Lichtenstein
He is famous for giving us two-meter comics. He did everything even easier than Warhol: he took a picture that he liked, enlarged it in size and transferred it to silk canvases measuring 2x3 meters (sometimes even more). Now, following his example, they make a lot of paintings depicting superheroes or superheroines. Sometimes in his paintings, in addition to images, words flashed.
3 Tom Wesselman
Bath Collage, T. Wesselman
He became famous for depicting flat, drawn people (often women) on real objects. Also, once he painted a still life depicting a table with fruit on it and two paintings: a star and a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. But the main feature of this picture was that the artist made a hole in it in the area of the table and put a TV there. In the 80s, by the way, he worked with metal and carved his drawings on it.
4 Robert Rauschenberg
"The Way to Heaven", R. Rauschenberg
The creator of "combined paintings" that combine a drawing and a real object. True, if Wesselmann used this technique on the canvas, Rauschenberg did it differently: he literally exhibited objects in galleries. So, for example, one of his most famous works is a bed. Literally his bed, covered in paint and set upright. True, most often in a similar direction, he acted using stuffed animals. In addition, he had three stages, according to which he created his first works: on a white background, numbers and figures were depicted in black (the first); crumpled newspapers (the second) were glued onto the canvas, objects (nails, newspapers, photographs, etc.) were placed on all this, and the picture was covered in red. He is famous for having erased a painting by Willem de Kooning (one of the leaders of abstract expressionism) and exhibited it, calling it "The Erased Drawing of Willem de Kooning". Later, in the 60s and 70s, he stopped drawing and went into theatrical actions that pop art spawned.
5 Jasper Johns
"Two banks" D. Jones
An artist who paints flags and casts toothbrushes and beer cans into bronze. He began his creative path by painting the picture "Flag", having slept on the American flag. Almost all of his paintings in this direction are of the American flag in different colors. Interestingly, Jasper Johns is the most expensive living artist. And his painting "The White Flag" was bought by the museum in 1998 for more than $20 million.
Conclusion
Pop art took with its simplicity, uncomplicatedness and unusualness. It replaced the abstract and incomprehensible style, and was so “alive” and understandable to everyone that it became part of mass culture literally immediately. Naturally, everything ends sooner or later and goes into decline, but at the moment, pop art paintings are being created, although their creators are unlikely to understand the real essence of this movement.
"200 cans of Campbell's soup" E. Warhol
(eng. popular art - popular art; or from pop - a jerky sound, clap, cork slamming, literally - art that produces an explosive, shocking effect) - a direction in art of the 1950s-1960s, which is characterized by the use and processing of images of mass culture . He was a kind of reaction to abstract art, although he found his connection with Dadaism and Surrealism. Pop Art began in 1952, when the London-based Independent Group began to study the images of popular art. But pop art gained popularity in its American version, in the activities of R. Rauschenberg, K. Oldenberg, D. Rosenquist, D. Jones, R. Lichtenstein. They proclaimed as their goals a return to reality, the disclosure of the aesthetic value of mass production and mass media (advertising, photography, reproduction, comics), the entire artificial material environment surrounding a person. To do this, elements of mass culture were introduced into the paintings as a collage, direct quotation or photo reproduction (paintings by Rauschenberg, Warhol, Hamilton). Rosenquist and Wesselman imitated in the paintings the techniques and techniques of billboards. Lichtenstein enlarged the comic to the size of a large canvas. Oldenberg created replicas of display cases of large sizes from unusual materials. Thus, household items, packaging of goods, fragments of interiors, machine parts, popular printed images of famous personalities and events entered the art.
Pop art was the reaction of artists to the new urban environment created by popular culture. Her images were placed in a different context, a different scale and material were used, production techniques and their defects were revealed. As a result, the original image was paradoxically changed, reinterpreted, and depreciated. Pop art artists were among the initiators of such forms as happenings (an event not organized, but provoked by its authors, taking place directly in the city or in nature, an important part of it is the public and its reaction to this event; reflects the desire of avant-garde artists to merge art with life), object installation (spatial composition created by the artist from various household items, industry, natural objects, textual and visual information), environment (a composition that embraces the viewer like a real environment, often imitation of interiors with figures of people), assembly ( extended type of collage), video art (experiments with video equipment, computer and television images). These techniques subsequently spread widely both in Europe and in other regions of the world.
Pop Art
Direction
Pop art (English pop art, short for popular art - popular or natural art) - a trend in the fine arts of Western Europe and the USA in the late 1950s and 1960s, which arose as a reaction of denial to abstract expressionism. As the main subject and image, pop art used images of consumer products. In fact, this direction in art has replaced the traditional fine art - with the demonstration of certain objects of mass culture or the material world.
The image borrowed in popular culture is placed in a different context:
The term “pop art” first appeared in the press in an article by the English critic Lawrence Alloway, in 1966 Alloway openly admitted: “Then I did not put into this concept the meaning that it contains today. I used this word along with the term "pop culture" to describe the products of the mass media, and not the works of art for which elements of this "folk culture" were used. In any case, the concept came into use sometime between the winter of 1954/55 and 1957.
The first "Part" works were created by three artists who studied at the Royal College of Art in London - Peter Blake, Joe Tilson and Richard Smith. But the first work to achieve pop art icon status was Richard Hamilton's collage "What Makes Our Homes Today So Different, So Inviting?" (1956)
Pop art has been repeatedly criticized by artists and art critics. On September 13, 1962, the New York Museum of Modern Art organized a symposium on pop art. In the ensuing discussion, influential conservative critic Hilton Kramer of The New York Times opined that, at its core, pop art is "no different from the art of advertising." According to Kramer, both of these phenomena aim to "reconcile us with the world of commodities, platitudes and vulgarity." The critic insisted on the need for a decisive opposition to pop art.
Poet, critic and Pulitzer Prize winner Stanley Kunitz, who attended the symposium, also disapproved of pop art, reproaching the representatives of this artistic movement for striving to please the ruling social class: according to the poet, they express "the spirit of conformism and the bourgeoisie." In addition, Kunitz suggested that pop art "signs, slogans and techniques come directly from the citadel of bourgeois society, from the bastion where the images and needs of the masses are formed."
Mario Amaya (English)
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