Modern art pop art. Pop Art: A Brief History

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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(eng. pop art, short for popular art popular, public art; the second meaning of the word is associated with onomatopoeic English pop jerky blow, clap, slap, i.e. producing a shocking effect) art direction of the late 1950s early 1970s; arises as an opposition to non-objective abstractionism; marks the transition to the concept of a new avant-garde.

Representatives of pop art proclaimed their goal "a return to reality", but a reality already mediated by the mass media: glossy magazines, advertising, packaging, television, and photography became their source of inspiration. Pop art returned the object to art, but it was not a poeticized artistic vision, but a deliberately everyday object, associated with modern industrial culture and, in particular, with modern forms of information (print, television, cinema).

New techniques borrowed from industrial design and advertising: photo printing, the use of a slide projector, the inclusion of real objects, contributed both to the "depersonalization" of the individual creative manner of the artist, and to the "disclosure of the aesthetic value" of mass production samples.

Pop art originated in England; American and French artists achieved the greatest fame. Similar trends appeared in Italy, Germany, and even in the USSR, which at that time was separated from the rest of the world by the Iron Curtain.

Kuzmina M. Pop Art. In the book: Modernism. 3rd ed., M., 1980
Katalin Keseru. Variations on POP ART. Budapest, 1994
Obukhova A., Orlova M. Painting without borders. From pop art to conceptualism. 19601970s. History of painting. 20th century. M., Galart, 2001

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Introduction

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the classical type of thinking of the modern era changes to non-classical, and at the end of the century - to post-non-classical. To fix the mental specifics of the new era, which was radically different from the previous one, a new term was introduced. The current state of science, culture and society as a whole in the 70s of the last century was characterized by J.-F. Lyotard as "the state of postmodernity". The emergence of postmodernism took place in the 60s and 70s. XX century, it is connected and logically follows from the processes of the modern era as a reaction to the crisis of its ideas, as well as to the so-called death of superfoundations: God (Nietzsche), author (Bart), man (humanity).
In the period of postmodernism, destruction covers all aspects of culture. Postmodernism as an artistic era carries an artistic paradigm that states that a person cannot withstand the pressure of the world and becomes a posthuman. All artistic trends of this period are permeated with this paradigm, manifesting and refracting it through their invariant conceptions of the world and personality. Pop Art - democrat-acquirer in a society of "mass consumption"; aleatoric - man is a player in the world of random situations; hyperrealism - an impersonal living system in a cruel and rough world; happening: masterful, anarchically "free", manipulated personality in a chaotic world of random events, etc.
Pop art was a movement of the 50s and 60s that reflected everyday life and depicted ordinary utilitarian objects. Pop art artists have blurred the clear line between high art and commercial art. Pop art is still relevant to this day. Today, the art world continues to reflect some of the ideas and techniques of Pop Art as an art movement, as well as the use of materials introduced into art by Pop Art artists.
The purpose of this work is to consider one of the areas of postmodernism - pop art.
Within the framework of this goal, the following tasks are required:

define the concept of "pop art";
characterize this direction in art;
consider the work of some representatives of pop art in art;
consider the main varieties (currents) of pop art.

Pop Art(Eng. Pop Art from popular art - popular, natural art) - a trend in the avant-garde art of Western Europe and the USA in the 1950s and 1960s, in which fine art was replaced by compositions from real objects, usually in unexpected or completely absurd combinations , thereby revealing "new aspects of reality".
The trend of pop art developed from Dadaism, it symbolized the "exit" of art into the field of mass culture, commercial advertising, fashion, market conditions and, despite the irony, the desire for outrageousness inherited from the Dadaists was not artistic, in most cases, not even aesthetic activities. The main category of pop art was not an image, but a “designation” (lat. designatio), which frees the author from the “man-made” process of depicting something. This term was introduced by M. Duchamp in order to expand the concept of art beyond the limits of the actual artistic kind of activity.

Pop art is the artistic satisfaction of the "longing for objectivity" generated by the long dominance of abstractionism and neo-abstractionism in Western art. Some researchers even see pop art as a reaction to non-objective art. Aestheticization of the entire material world becomes the principle of this art. Pop art is a new figurative art. Pop art opposed the abstractionist rejection of reality with the rough world of material things, which is attributed to the artistic and aesthetic status.
Pop art theorists argue that in a certain context, each object loses its original meaning and becomes a work of art. Therefore, the task of the artist is understood not as the creation of an artistic object, but as giving artistic qualities to an ordinary object by organizing a certain context for its perception. Aestheticization of the material world becomes the principle of pop art. Artists strive to achieve catchiness, visibility, and intelligibility of their creations, using the poetics of labels and advertising for this. Pop art is a composition of everyday objects, sometimes combined with a model or sculpture. Crumpled cars, faded photographs, scraps of newspapers and posters pasted on boxes, a stuffed chicken under a glass jar, a tattered shoe painted with white oil paint, electric motors, old tires or gas stoves - these are the art exhibits of pop art.
These artistic installations have their own aesthetic logic: objects that in ancient times had a purely utilitarian purpose (vessels for storing grain, amphorae that preserved wine) eventually acquired a purely artistic meaning and now stand on stands “under glass” in the best museums in the world.
Artists and theorists of pop art proceed from the premise: one should not wait for the hour when the utilitarian products of the modern era lose their practical purpose and, like ancient amphoras, acquire undoubted artistic value. It is possible in this aesthetic sphere to “accelerate the movement of history” and put a modern shoe on a museum stand, giving this exhibit an artistic and aesthetic status.
Pop art is focused on intuitive and irrational principles of creativity and approaches to reality. Western criticism writes about this: “All the best that is in pop art acts indirectly ... The principle underlying this art is to find a means of communication that undercuts any clear formulation of thought at the root”
According to Western critics and aesthetics, pop art is “anti-art” (G. Reid), “a perversion from art” (Planter), “a mixture of panopticon and dump” (Karl Borev), “a mirror of American reality” (Willy Bond), “a reflection of the consumer's dream” (Richard Hamilton), “an insult to everything that is synonymous with harmony” (A. Boske), “a way of drawing attention to the abstract properties of banal things” (Roy Lichtenstein).
Pop art put forward the concept of the consumer's identity of the "mass consumption" society. The ideal personality of pop art is a human consumer, for whom the aestheticized still lifes of commodity compositions should replace spiritual culture. Words replaced by goods, literature replaced by things, beauty replaced by usefulness, greed for material, commodity consumption, replacing spiritual needs, are characteristic of pop art. This direction is fundamentally oriented towards a mass, non-creative person, deprived of independent thinking and borrowing "his" thoughts from advertising and mass media, a person manipulated by television and other media. This personality is programmed by pop art to fulfill the given roles of the acquirer and consumer, dutifully demolishing the alienating influence of modern civilization. Pop Art Personality - Mass Culture Zombie.
As a rule, pop art does not deal with social issues. Some currents of pop art influenced the aesthetics of everyday life, others - on the art of window dressing.
Aestheticization and idealization of things characteristic of pop art have been encountered more than once in art. The still lifes of the "small Dutch" sang the beauty of things poeticized as the creations of human hands; in these still lifes the products of creative labor were sung. In pop art, a thing is aestheticized as an object of "mass consumption" in a "mass society". There is an aestheticized fetishism of consumption, a cult of things. This is the essence of pop art. Asserting a person-acquirer, pop art poeticizes a thing that should go into “mass consumption”, or a thing that has already been in use, has served, outdated, but still keeps the stamp of human use (compositions from used gas stoves, tires, furniture).
Demonstration of an old, worn out, spent, broken thing “through negation” establishes a new, full-fledged product. So, for example, at the World Exhibition in Montreal in the US pavilion one could see an old shabby car, with the help of which not only the world-famous brands of American cars, not only comfort and service, but, ultimately, the American image were advertised “on the contrary”. life. This is an important advertising and aesthetic technique of pop art - showing an old, worn or broken thing, which "on the contrary" proves the need for a new, full-fledged product.
Pop art - advertising propaganda of a thing and the statement of a fetishistic attitude towards it. This is achieved with the help of collages (for example, in the compositions of K. Oldenburg) or with the help of a decorated interior (for example, a shovel hanging on a chain - "Kitchen" by J. Dine). The aesthetics of pop art is the aesthetics of utilitarianism, often nihilistic, affirming a thing as a fetish through negation.
Pop art is an outwardly rebellious art that performed a "protective" function of adapting a person to society. A whole wing of pop art joined with the social nihilism of the New Left. The content of pop art is universal denial, and the goal is universal, collective ecstasy, which is "an act of rebellion against all and every form of alienation." The rebellion of the "new left" was a form of getting used to the young personality in Western society. The wing of pop art, which served this rebellion, tried in every possible way to get away from literature, from the word, from aesthetics - from everything that verbally formulates the worldview orientations of the individual. And this is the internal contradiction of the rebels.
Pop art merged with the social nihilism of the "new left", animated by the pathos of universal denial. This was perceived by them as the release of "revolutionary potentialities", as a rebellion against alienation For the "new left" pop music and its impact on the mass audience became a model of the social function of art. They favored pop music as it tends to be perceived directly, collectively and ecstatically.

2. Formation and development of pop art as an artistic direction

The United States suffers from a cultural inferiority complex: they feel that their historical and cultural layer is small (only two or three hundred years, in Europe it is ten times larger), moreover, it was not the civilization of America, but the culture of Paris that dictated the artistic fashions of the world; as a rule, new artistic trends were born in Europe. And it was America that created a new artistic direction in the 60s - pop art. However, is it America?
Long before American artists proclaimed the creation of a new direction - pop art, its main idea was proclaimed and implemented in Russia. In 1919, David Burliuk, with a group of futurists, traveled around the Soviet provincial cities, engulfed in the civil war in Russia. In one provincial town, performances by futurists were announced, accompanied by an art exhibition. Due to transport and general troubles of the era, Burliuk's paintings did not arrive on time and the exhibition was cancelled. Then, at the suggestion of V. Shklovsky, exhibits were hung at the exhibition, which today we could attribute to the art of pop art: the main masterpiece of this exhibition were Shklovsky's socks, placed under glass in a frame.
Important steps in the development of pop art in the United States were the New Realism exhibitions that began in 1962 at the Sydney Janis Gallery and at the Guggenheim Museums of Contemporary Art. In the same year, Richard Hamilton exhibited a series of ideologically biased lithographs and paintings created in the spirit of pop art, Let's Explore the Stars Together, on the theme of Kennedy's space exploration program. In the center of the exposition, Hamilton placed an advertising-poster photo collage depicting Kennedy in an astronaut's spacesuit at the helm of an interplanetary spacecraft.
Pop art soon crossed the ocean and appeared in Europe at the Kassel Biennale (1964). Since 1964, Hamilton has exhibited his pop art works not only in New York, but also in London, Milan, Kassel, and Berlin. London's Tate Gallery (1970) staged the first retrospective exhibition of Hamilton's work. 170 of his works were exhibited: from pencil sketches (illustrations for James Joyce's novel "Ulysses") to twelve sketches depicting popular fashion models in a stylized way using collage, enamel and cosmetics (cycle "Mode Cliche", 1969). Hamilton's most famous works include: Interior II (1964), Whitley Bay (1965), I Dream of a White Christmas (1967).
American criticism noted that the use of modern printing methods, which largely shape our ideas about the world, gives Hamilton's work the character of obsessive visions.
Different pop art artists have a "genre" specialization. So, D. Chamberlain is addicted to wrecked cars. The favorite genre of K. Oldenburg is collage, J. Dine is domestic interiors. R. Rauschenberg was trained as a theater artist, and the problem of the subject organization of space in his new activity remained leading. He arranges things according to the principle of "artistic disorder". In addition, Rauschenberg created a "combined painting", which is voiced by audio equipment. One of his techniques was photomontage combined with scraps of newspapers, paintings and old things.

3. Representatives of pop art in art

The most famous representatives of pop art, reflecting the pragmatism of technical civilization, were E. Warhol, J. Segal, R. Rauschenberg, K. Oldenburg.
US critics call the American artist the "Father of Pop Art" E. Warhol. His career began in 1962, when the impresario Irwin Bloom organized an exhibition in Los Angeles. For the first time, viewers saw multiply enlarged images of labels from cans and bottles of tomato juice instead of paintings. Warhol turned such specific features of advertising as expressiveness, deliberate loudness, banality, primitivism, and orientation towards the average person into an aesthetic principle of his work. E. Warhol wrote that he wants to be an inhumane machine, separated from the art it creates.
His frankly borrowed and replicated images of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Coca-Cola and the American dollar literally shook up world art. It was the era of the 60s with their volcanic surge of youth energy, the thirst for renewal, the activation of popular culture and the emergence of pop art. It was this America that became the protagonist of Warhol's works, which brought him fame as the first superstar among artists. The popularity of Warhol was unimaginable. At one of the exhibitions, he even exhibited himself as his work. Warhol's energy manifested itself in a variety of areas, showing a new type of contemporary artist. His countless silk-screen prints, his tens of hours of films, his ubiquitous always-on tape recorder, his Interview magazine, where stars interview stars, his Factory, as he called his studio, his hangouts and silver-dyed hair - all this is Warhol- artist. The book "The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Vice Versa)" is also in this row. It does not look like the usual memoirs and declarations of artists, it is rather a purely literary, essayistically complex work, a number of chapters of which are written in the genre of Andy's dialogue (A) with a certain interlocutor (B). The text of this book is key to understanding the personality and work of Andy Warhol. A text about love and fame, about time and death, about art and beauty, and about how to save money and how to clean, and why everyone needs a hairdresser, and sometimes insoles are more important than a diamond. Simple and complex truths of every day of an artist's life.
Robert Earnest Milton Rauschenberg(1925-2008) - American artist, representative of abstract expressionism, and then conceptual art and pop art. In his works he gravitated towards collage and readymade techniques. In his works he used garbage and various garbage.
Rauschenberg's early work was an attempt to get rid of the stereotypes of the "pictorial method" and the lofty aims of traditional art. For example, he erased a drawing by Willem de Kooning and posted it under the title Erased de Kooning. During the 1950s, Rauschenberg's work gradually increased the number of real objects - newspaper photographs, pieces of cloth, wood, cans, grass, stuffed animals - until the feeling was reached that the canvas or the entire composition was about to burst into some other world, strangely distorted reality. Rauschenberg's two key works are collages Bed(1955) and Monogram(1955–1959). The first of these was an actual Rauschenberg bed, spattered with paint and set upright like a painting; the second collage was decorated with a stuffed angora goat. In the sixties, Rauschenberg began to arrange performances, collaborate with engineers and use various printed materials; he sought to express the complexity and multi-layered existence of modern industrial society. In the 1980s, several albums of photographs by Rauschenberg were published, which were the logical conclusion to the frequent use of photographic material in collages and the embodiment of the author's idea of ​​the world as an absurd pile of images.
Roy Lichtenstein(1923-1997) - American artist, representative of pop art. By borrowing themes and mimicking the techniques of commercial pictorial production—comics, movie posters, advertising—Lichtenstein shaped the iconography of American consumer culture.
Lichtenstein was born October 27, 1923 in New York to a wealthy family. In 1940 he entered the faculty of fine arts at Ohio State University. In 1960 Lichtenstein met Klaas Oldenburg, Jim Dine and other New York avant-garde artists. At that time, "happenings" were often arranged in New York. It was from these semi-improvised, semi-theatrical performances, when ordinary objects were placed in an unusual context, that Lichtenstein and his colleagues developed a new style that poeticizes everyday life - pop art.
In his first pop art works, Lichtenstein used the most banal themes and objects of commercial production: golf balls, sneakers, hot dogs and other consumer goods, poses reminiscent of pornographic photographs ( Girl with a ball, 1961), and scenes of raw violence from comics and tabloid fiction ( Torpedo... los!, 1963). In his other works, in a similar stylized and ironic manner, plots and forms characteristic of cubism, fauvism, surrealism, abstract expressionism and other areas of contemporary art are interpreted. Lichtenstein also produced sculptures, mural paintings, and paintings as abstract as the painting he decried in his pop art.
Claes Oldenburg(1929) - American sculptor of Swedish origin, a classic of pop art. The son of a Swedish diplomat, Oldenburg lived in the USA from 1936. He lived mainly in New York and Chicago from 1946-1950. studied at Yale University and then, until 1954, at the Art Institute in Chicago. In the 1960s Oldenburg performed a lot with various kinds of happenings. He later became more committed to object art.
Oldenburg's most characteristic technique is the sculptural image of a rather small and completely ordinary object on a disproportionately gigantic scale, and often also bizarrely colored and unexpectedly located in space. Initially provocative, Oldenburg's works are now read as an elegant game that easily fits into the urban landscape - therefore, over time, Oldenburg's works are more actively used as a visual solution to the urban environment. So, the entrance to the Chiat \ Day advertising agency in Los Angeles was made by Oldenburg in the form of giant black binoculars, and in Milan, on the square in front of the Cadorna railway station, a giant needle was half stuck into the ground with a bright red-yellow-green thread sticking out of it ( on the opposite side of the square there is the other end of the thread, with a knot). In 1989, Oldenburg was awarded the Wolf Prize in the field of art, in 1995 - the Rolf Schock Prize.
George Segal(1924-2000) American painter and sculptor, known for his work in plaster. Sehgal's early drawings and canvases from the 1950s show the complex world of people in dramatic life situations. As a sculptor who began working in the era of pop art, Sehgal creates his works from plaster and presents the first situational work in 1959/1960 man on a bicycle, depicting a plaster figure of a cyclist on an ordinary factory bicycle. His first plaster figures had a frame made of wood or wire. Since 1961, he has been making plaster castings directly, removing them from parts of the human body. In the following years, environmental items like " Cinema" (1963) and " Restaurant» (1967). In the early 1980s, J. Segal created sculptural still lifes from plaster fruits. Works also with bronze (compositions): “ woman by the lake"(bronze, covered with white lacquer, 1985)," chance meeting"(bronze, 1989)," Woman on the bench"(bronze, covered with white lacquer; metal bench, 1989).
Segal's works meet the basic principles of American pop art - the current. He was inspired by images of everyday life. Comics, advertising and industrial products became the sources of her imaginative world. One of the founders of pop art, Richard Hamilton, defined its content in the following words: popular, short-lived, cheap, mass, young, witty, sexy, playful, chic and Big Business. The instantaneousness of the plot is emphasized in painting with the help of a technique that resembles the effects of photography, in sculpture - with a careful recreation of small details. Reproducing the daily, ordinary, general aspects of human life, Sehgal always leaves a place for the viewer in the space of his works.

4. Varieties of pop art

Pop art as an art direction has a number of varieties (trends):

op art(artistically organized optical effects, geometrized combinations of lines and spots),
ocr art(compositions, artistic organization of the environment surrounding the viewer),
el-art(objects and structures moving with the help of electric motors, this trend of pop art stood out as an independent artistic direction - kineticism).

Conclusion

Summarizing the above, the following conclusions can be drawn.
Pop Art(Eng. Pop Art from popular art - popular, natural art) - a trend in the avant-garde art of Western Europe and the USA in the 1950s and 1960s, in which fine art was replaced by compositions from real objects, usually in unexpected or completely absurd combinations .
The term "pop art" (popular art) was introduced by the critic L. Eloway in 1965. As an artistic direction, pop art reinforces the opposition that has long been outlined in art: mass - folk; mass - elite.
Pop art is the artistic satisfaction of the "longing for objectivity" generated by the long dominance of abstractionism and neo-abstractionism in Western art. Some researchers even see pop art as a reaction to non-objective art. Aestheticization of the entire material world becomes the principle of this art. Pop art is a new figurative art. Pop art opposed the abstractionist rejection of reality with the rough world of material things, to which an artistic and aesthetic status is attributed.
Pop art put forward the concept of the consumer's identity of the "mass consumption" society. The ideal personality of pop art is a human consumer, for whom the aestheticized still lifes of commodity compositions should replace spiritual culture.
etc.................

Despite the fact that this style originated in London, as a result, pop art turned out to be one of the symbols of America. In the conventional sense, just as Elvis Presley is considered the king of rock and roll, the American avant-garde artist is recognized as a cult person in the history of the pop art movement. Andy Warhole (1928-1987).

It was he who, in the early seventies, turned a can of tomato soup " Campbell" V art object, exhibiting dozens of paintings of the same type with her image in an art gallery, thereby comparing the sale of works of art with the sale of products.

Warhol had tried this method of "flow art" a few years earlier, when he hired boys to color his illustrations for the wild recipes of his parody.

Still, international fame for American pop art was brought by such artists as Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008), Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997) and Jasper Johns (1930). It was their ideas that had a direct impact on Warhol's work. It was Jones who pioneered the idea of ​​"circulation of objects," which Warhol later took to the extreme, suggesting either the idea of ​​endless rows of products on a supermarket shelf, or the movement of film frames. But even doubling the images, Jasper Johns combined emotionality with the conceptual ideas of pop art in his works. For example, his beer cans Ballantine Ale» (1960), executed in bronze and mounted on a marble base, still looks like an ironic monument to the most massive American product.

An interesting detail is that the famous work was created by him in response to a caustic remark by the opponent of pop art, one of the leaders of abstract expressionism, Willem de Kooning, about the ability of the gallery owner Leo Castelli to buy anything, even beer cans, if they are called art.

Naturally, food and everything connected with it fell into the area of ​​the most mass consumption. Especially products that advertising has made cult. A grocery chain with golden arches on the facade could not help but become the target of pop art artists. Today's pop art classic Klaas Oldenburg, at the 1962 exhibition, presented the audience with the image of the popular American product of McDonald's, designed in the form of the Giant Hamburger composition.

Hypertrophied dimensions gave his image a kind of symbolism and parodic grandeur. In addition, canvas filled with foam was the material for the work.

Product fetishism and the ideology of equal opportunity in the United States led to mass worship of the brands of some products. Advertising turned Coca-Cola soda into a totem of democracy, allegedly because "both the president in the White House and the homeless on the street can drink it." But if the novel by the English science fiction writer HG Wells, mockingly titled " Tono-Benge”, was a satire on the aggressive advertising and distribution of Coca-Cola, then earned fame on semi-advertising posters in the form of racy pictures of nude girls advertising this and other food brands of the 50s.

Pop art has learned to move objects into art. But these were already objects not poeticized by artistic vision, but objects deliberately everyday, associated with modern industrial culture.

«… in my opinion, a painting is more like the real world when it is made from the objects of this world »

Robert Rauschenberg, one of the founders of modern pop art, argued.

By using the technique ready-made", inherited from the art theorist of the 20th century Marcel Duchamp, and using the techniques of collage, pop art artists introduced everyday quotes into the picture - elements of "mass culture", thereby connecting painting with reality.

In the 60s, he began to work in this genre, who at the beginning of his career traded in illustrations and cartoons. In art works, he combined a planar image with real attributes of domestic life.

In the interior of the kitchen he painted, just like the magic door in Carlo's closet, the installed door from a real refrigerator is lost from sight. But desserts and cocktails in the painting "The Magnificent American Nude" are put by the artist at the head of the composition as an outstanding artifact of consumer paradise. If Wesselman mounted the "sweets of life" using the collage technique, then the colorful image of bright cakes and pastries, sweets and desserts is recognized as a corporate identity.

For those to whom Thibault's paintings seem too "childish", we will inform you that at the auction Sotheby's his paintings were sold for several million dollars.

Pop art collectors are ready to pay no less high price for a piece of cherry pie, which was “baked” in the oven of its own “production” by one of the elders of the pop art movement, Roy Lichtenstein.

No matter how critics or viewers relate to pop art, it has become one of the dominant trends in contemporary modernist art. The idealistic accusations of false innovation and decadence brought against pop art by some art critics did not affect its development. True, if the naturalism of pop art at the beginning of the 20th century manifested itself in the desire to reproduce, “mirror” real life, then, having passed the path “from image to reality”, modern modernism is acquiring more and more rational, consumer forms from body art to advertising sales. The scope of "commodity aesthetics" is increasingly shifting to the sphere of sale of goods and the sphere of entertainment. Not without reason, Ray Kroc, the man who invented McDonald's in the form in which it exists now, liked to repeat that he does not work in the food industry, but in show business.

With such interpenetration, the work of many prominent representatives of pop art has been and will be associated with the product theme. It is their activities that we will try to reflect in more detail in separate articles.

The direction in art of the 1950s and early 1970s arises as an objection to immortal abstractionism, as a transition to a new vision of avant-garde. Artists of this direction use images of mass consumption products in their work. They combine everyday objects, photographs, reproductions, excerpts from printed publications in their works. Inspirers are glossy magazines, television, advertising, photography.

New techniques (photo printing, the use of a slide projector, borrowed from industrial design and advertising) deprived artists of their unique individual style of performance, but at the same time revealed the aesthetic side of mass production samples.

-History of Pop Art

In 1952, several artists, critics and architects at the Institute of Modern Art in London created the "Independent Group", which studied modern technology and urban culture. On the basis of research, they are trying to form a new art. They took American culture as a basis, which evoked dual feelings of irony and admiration. One of the members of the group, critic Lawrence Alloway, coined the term "pop art" to refer to this style. The first work that became an icon of this direction was Richard Hamilton's collage “So what makes our homes today so special, so attractive?” 1956 After that, the connection of various items of printed matter becomes one of the main techniques of pop art. Further students of the institute used urban images in their works - graffiti, advertising posters. A little later in America, the public saw a work that would later become recognizable throughout the world. This is the work of Andy Warhol, made in the technique of silk-screen printing - a portrait of Marilyn Monroe. Soon, other equally well-known works were added to this work: Liechtenstein's comics in oil painting format, huge vinyl hamburgers and others.

Criticism reacted differently to the emerging direction. Some said it was not art, but anti-art. However, in Los Angeles he was received excellently, as there was no strict artistic tradition and there were wealthy residents who were very willing to collect works of modern art. With the help of numerous exhibitions, Pop Art spread throughout Europe.

- Representatives of Pop Art

• Richard Hamilton is an English painter and member of the Independent Group. Creator of the first Pop Art work entitled "So what makes our homes today so different, so attractive?"

• Roy Lichtenstein- English artist, great master of pop art. He used acid colors and various typographic techniques to create his works. His comic book oil paintings symbolized American life in an ironic interpretation.

• Andy Warhole- American artist, designer, writer. A cult figure in the direction of Pop Art and, in general, all contemporary art. He created the world-famous painting of Marilyn Monroe in silkscreen technique.

• Claes Oldenburg- famous American sculptor, classic of Pop Art. His peculiarity was the manner of depicting everyday objects on a gigantic scale and often bizarre colors, which were subsequently unexpectedly located in the surrounding space of the city. For example, in Milan, in front of the railway station, there is his sculpture - a needle, with a multi-colored thread sticking out of it.

• Robert Rauschenberg- American artist. Initially, he was a representative of abstract expressionism, and later on conceptual art and pop art. When creating his works, he liked to use garbage and various garbage.

• Tadaomi Shibuya- designer, artist, illustrator. Creating images in the style of pop art, he takes straight lines as a basis, uses the blur effect, depicts geometric patterns from which in the end a very harmonious work with well-read images is obtained.

• James Rizzi - the most talented artist, the star of the direction of Pop - art. This man made the world brighter. There were no barriers for him, he painted on almost everything he could reach: on any small objects, on fabric, on cars and houses. He gave happiness to all people.

• Peter Blake - English painter who was a member of the first generation of British Pop Art painters. He was interested in contemporary art from a young age. Unlike many artists of this trend, who used clippings from advertisements and magazines in their work, Peter Blake creates real pictorial images. For example, a work called "Playing Chess with Tracy."

He also designed the cover for the Beatles' world-famous Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band"