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MID-20TH CENTURY ABSTRACTION
Pop Art
The decade of the 1960s was perhaps one of the most provocative — culturally, politically, and
philosophically — of the 20th century. The amazing growth that transpired in America from the end of
World War II through the cold war period of the 1950s resulted in a newly formed consumer culture.
America had become an industrialized society poised on the brink of the information age.
A number of the artists who emerged, or, more appropriately, burst upon the art world, particularly
in New York and Los Angeles, in the first years of the decade were responding to this new commercialism.
Indeed, those who came to be identified as Pop artists embraced consumerism as a fitting subject of
their art. Expression and gesture — hallmarks of
Abstract Expressionism,
which preceded Pop in the late 1940s and early 1950s — were replaced with cool, detached, mechanical
illustrations of common objects, often based on appropriated advertising images. Pop art was in
fact proposing a new kind of subjectivity, one that did not rely on an artist’s singular expressive
gesture. While many of the Abstract Expressionists had turned hermetically inward, the Pop artists
turned outward for aesthetic stimuli. Radically redefining the subject matter deemed suitable for
aesthetic use, Pop art was a significant sociological phenomenon and a mirror of society. In turn,
the consumer industry itself adopted Pop art as an antidote to the rigidity of high art. Pop, which
came to encompass the fields of music, consumer design, and fashion, corresponded to an entire way of
life among young people in the 1960s.
In Pop art, the narrative or epic impulse of
Abstract Expressionism was
replaced with straightforward
depictions of the everyday, and the mass-produced was afforded the same significance as unique works
of fine art. Basing their techniques, style, and imagery on certain aspects of mass reproduction,
media - derived imagery, and consumer society, Pop artists gleefully eroded the gulf between high art
and low art, taking inspiration from advertising, pulp magazines, billboards, movies, television, comic
strips, and shop window displays. These images, presented with — and sometimes transformed by — humor,
wit, and irony, may be read as both an unabashed celebration and a scathing critique of popular culture.
The term “Pop art” was first used in print by Alloway in 1958 to characterize the manifestations of
popular culture (television, advertising, billboards, magazines) that were considered inferior to high
culture. Prior to Alloway’s Guggenheim exhibition, the art world of the 1960s was struggling to properly
identify the new aesthetic it found itself confronted with. The speed with which Pop art excited the
popular imagination was commensurate with the very brief period of time in which it initially flourished
(1960–64). Contrary to the adage that most great art is ignored for years, this new art quickly sparked
so much interest and enthusiasm from critics, collectors, and gallery owners that even its moniker was
much debated: New Realism, Popular Image art, Common Object art, Factualism, Neo-Dadaism, American Dream
Painting, Sign Painting, Anti-Sensibility Painting, and Cool art were just a few names put forth in an
attempt to label the new style. “Pop art” won out, being a shorthand for popular culture that then
evolved to describe the artistic expressions of that culture.
Developing his style in the early 1950s, Robert Rauschenberg proposed an alternative to the prevailing
mode of art making in the U.S. Using a collage technique employing popular imagery, the diverse objects
of Rauschenberg’s celebrated Combine paintings fused two-dimensional painting with sculpture. Working at
the same time, Jasper Johns, playing on illusion and reality, repainted beer cans, targets, and the
American flag, objects so iconic and commonplace that they required a new set of criteria to be viewed
as artworks. The flag, in particular, became emblematic in Johns’s practice, and he has returned to it
on many occasions, changing or manipulating the color and rendering its image in various mediums, from
graphite to ink and even bronze.
The unique approach to the object that these two artists developed paved the way for the Pop artists in
the next decade. In the tradition of Rauschenberg’s Combines, Jim Dine’s canvases often feature actual
objects such as tools, bathroom fixtures, and real or depicted articles of clothing. These items were
frequently the artist’s personal possessions. For Shoe (1961), Dine focused on a brown-and-white oxford
to evoke the elegant attire of Fred Astaire admired during the artist’s youth. In 1961 Claes Oldenburg
opened The Store. This large-scale environment contained colorful plaster sculptures of shirts, ties,
dresses, and food, all of which were sold as merchandise from a storefront on the Lower East Side of
Manhattan. Oldenburg continued his exploration of common everyday objects in his soft sculptures,
reconfiguring food items, such as a hamburger and an ice-cream cone, and mechanical devices like
telephones and typewriters, into uncanny, often humorous sculptural forms.
Many of these artists used commercial techniques and the language of advertising and mass media in their
work. In the late 1950s, James Rosenquist supported himself as a billboard painter. He adapted the
techniques of enlarging photographic images on a colossal scale to his enigmatic, large-scale montages
of images derived from mass culture. The billboard aesthetic also informs Wesselmann’s Still Life #33
(1963), which despite its grand scale is meant to be read as a group of objects on a tabletop. The
gleaming sandwich, towering beer can, and pack of cigarettes stand firmly if somewhat ironically as
monuments to consumerism.
Roy Lichtenstein said of Pop art,
“There are certain things that are useable, forceful, and viable
about commercial art.” His paintings based on comic-book illustrations and use of simulated Benday dots
to suggest cheap printing acknowledge the role of popular forms, but Lichtenstein often included
references to art history in his works, as in his large-scale Preparedness (1968), which suggests the
machine paintings of Fernand Léger and the WPA
murals of the 1930s. Similarly intrigued by mechanical
printing techniques, both
Andy Warhol and Rauschenberg began to
experiment with the processes of photo
silkscreening around 1962. In works like his monumental Barge (1963), Rauschenberg exploited the
imperfections of the silkscreen process and added gestural elements of paint to assert their handmade
nature. Warhol used found printed material from newspapers, advertisements, and publicity stills as
subject matter, reproducing the same images repeatedly in different colors and sizes. He was
particularly fascinated with contemporary icons like Jackie Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, and Elizabeth
Taylor. His many portrayals of them comment on the American fascination with celebrity as well as the
artist’s own life-long obsession with fame.
As a self-contained movement Pop art had dissipated by the end of the 1960s. The current work of many
of its early practitioners has moved away from purely Pop statements, but continues to provide lively
commentary on contemporary culture. Forty years ago, when Pop art was still considered a bold presence
in a fine-art museum, the Guggenheim Museum
staged "Six Painters and the Object", validating the movement at a critical juncture.
"I hope this resource has helped you understand more about the
Modern Art of the 20th Century which has inspired me!"
- Taylor Anne Smith
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