Pop Art

Pop Art was an art movement which had the sense of optimism during the post war of the 1950s and 1960s. Pop Art is meant to be brash, young and fun.  A British critic, Lawrence Allowy invented the word ‘POP’ in 1954 to describe a new art that was influenced by the imagery of popular culture. Allowy and together with two other artists Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi created a group which is known as the Independent Group. In this group there are a collective of artists, architectures and writers where they explored radical approaches to contemporary visual culture during their meeting at ICA in London. The Independent group was the first designers for the British Pop Art.  

Pop art in America was slightly different from the British pop art. American Pop art was created to replace the abstract Expressionism because by the mid 1950s many felt that this movement had become too serious. In order to change the latter trend, pop art in America was evolved in order to re introduce the image as a structural device in painting, to pull art back from the obscurity of abstraction into the real world again. This was tried and tested before by Picasso where forty years ago he tried to collaged the ‘real world’ printed images onto his still life because he feared that his art will become too abstract.  Around 1955, two artists Jasper John and Robert Rauschenberg were the leaders of the American Pop art.

Andy Warhol
An artist who personifies Pop art more than any other artists is Andy Warhol. He was the most successful commercial illustrator in New York who had become a leading artist of the 60s Pop art movement. He was best known for his industrial silkscreen process where he used the same image constantly. He used this technique for the Campbell’s soup cans and on the coca cola bottles.

Nowadays…
Today Pop art movement is still popular. One can still see Pop art artworks printed on products such as T shirts, bags among others.

Here some examples of posters and advertisement:

Chanel

References:

Artyfactory.com, (2015). Pop Art - the art of popular culture. [online] Available at: http://www.artyfactory.com/art_appreciation/art_movements/pop_art.htm [Accessed 29 Jan. 2015].

Biography.com, (2015). [online] Available at: http://www.biography.com/people/andy-warhol-9523875#artistic-career [Accessed 29 Jan. 2015].