Pop ArtThe birth of Pop art (short for Popular art) emerged in England between the years of 1950 and 1960, but heightened to its full potential in New York. Pop art was a form of rebellion against Abstract Expressionism. Pop artists felt that “Abstract Expressionism was an elite art, to which only a tiny class, mainly of painters and poets, could respond” (30 Compton). Pop artists also considered them pretentious and over-intense and at the same time, only selling to the greedy middle class. So, in order for the artists who were against Abstract Expressionism to dissent from that pretentious position they created Pop art.
Pop art is the imagery of popular culture drawn from the cinema, television, advertising, comics and packaging to express abstract formal relationships. Furthermore, Pop artists also duplicated common mass production images such as beer bottles, soup cans, comic strips and road signs in paintings, collages, and sculptures. Others actually incorporated the objects themselves into their paintings and sculptures, and often times modifying them as well. Materials of modern technology, such as plastic, urethane foam, and acrylic paint, were also included in some of their art works.
Critics did not easily accept this new and bizarre style of art. In fact, the “politically engaged critics … complained that Pop art is the art of passive acceptance” and that the subject matters are wild and impassioned, “and therefore in itself a satire on American life”. (30 Compton) However, that is rarely the case, the artists may be radical but they never intend to satirize the American life. Their only purpose is to stress the importance of an everyday object and their instant recognizable image and for everyone to be able to relate to it
Arts Essays
