Pop Art

Pop Art Movement 1953 onwards

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Prior to the Pop Art movement, Art was considered to be something serious and was concerned with serious subject matter such as portraits of important people, the expression of serious ideas, landscapes, classical scenes.

Artists had previously, always depicted important occasions, religious stories, portraits of important or wealthy people or scenes depicting images of the daily life of people. Images that were recognizable to the viewers of the time.

 The aim of the Pop Artists was to focus attention on, and tell everyone about, everyday things they looked at the values of ordinary people and commented on consumerism, mass production, newspapers, television, movies, comics, signs and celebrity. They wanted to show people that these subjects (everyday things) were suitable, important subjects for artworks.
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 Pop artists took their inspiration from comic books, advertising, food labels, even food itself! Big advertisements, bill boards, famous name brand logos, TV, movies. They often actually depicted these items in their works.

 Pop Artists used large areas of flat colours, bright Primary Colours like those in cartoons and comic books.

Roy Lichtenstein

Coca Cola Bottles (210) Andy Warhol 1962

The coke bottles are depicted as if they were displayed in a supermarket. The Coke bottle is a symbol of contemporary society. Andy Warhol said there is only one Coke, and everybody from presidents and film stars to the poorest in society all drink exactly the same the same product.

Roll of Bills 1962 Pencil, crayon and felt tip on paper

When deciding what to paint, a friend of Andy Warhols asked him what he loved most and he said Money. The dollar bill is a significant symbol of material success.

Many Pop Artists worked as commercial artists at the time: designing advertising, window displays, comic books, painting billboards etc. Commercial art had been looked down upon by fine artists of the time but the Pop Artists used these processes to make fine art rather than advertising.
Andy Warhol

 Pop artists began to use the properties of commercial art as inspiration: mechanical sources of reproduction such as the silk screen printing process, newspaper printing process, airbrush etc to produce the look of mass produced imagery such as comic books, newspaper images etc. These things were familiar to everyone, part of the mass media environment.

Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol

Tunafish Disaster 1963 Andy Warhol ! !

Multiple frames adds to the tension. The repeating of the images forces viewers to concentrate on what is going in the work the two women died from botulism as a result of eating from the tuna fish can depicted. The images were originally in a newspaper article.

Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol