The word pop first appeared in a cloud of smoke emerging from a revolver aimed at a smiling woman's head in 1947. Eduardo Paolozzi, a Scottish sculptor working in Paris, created this collage titled I was a Rich Man's Plaything as part of his Bunk! series. This image, featuring a pin-up girl and a gun, became the initial bearer of the term pop art, predating the movement's official recognition by nearly a decade. Paolozzi presented this material during a lecture at the Independent Group meeting in London in 1952, where he displayed collages assembled from American advertising, comic book characters, and magazine covers. The presentation marked a pivotal moment when young artists, architects, and critics began challenging prevailing modernist approaches to culture. They focused on the dynamic and paradoxical imagery of American pop culture as powerful, manipulative symbolic devices that were affecting whole patterns of life while simultaneously improving the prosperity of a society. This academic yet provocative approach laid the groundwork for a movement that would soon redefine the boundaries of fine art.
British Roots And American Fire
The origins of pop art in North America developed differently from those in Great Britain, creating two distinct but parallel trajectories. In the United States, pop art emerged as a reaction by artists who sought to return to hard-edged composition and representational art. They employed impersonal, mundane reality, irony, and parody to defuse the personal symbolism and painterly looseness of abstract expressionism. By contrast, British artists focused on the dynamic and paradoxical imagery of American pop culture as powerful, manipulative symbolic devices that were affecting whole patterns of life. Early pop art in Britain was a matter of ideas fueled by American popular culture when viewed from afar. The Independent Group, founded in London in 1952, served as the precursor to the pop art movement, gathering young painters, sculptors, architects, writers, and critics who were challenging prevailing modernist approaches to culture. Their group discussions centered on pop culture implications from elements such as mass advertising, movies, product design, comic strips, science fiction, and technology. The term pop art was first coined by John McHale in 1954 in conversation with Frank Cordell, though other sources credit its origin to British critic Lawrence Alloway. The specific term pop art first appeared in published print in the article But Today We Collect Ads by IG members Alison and Peter Smithson in Ark magazine in 1956.
The Soup Can Revolution
Andy Warhol held his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles in July 1962 at Irving Blum's Ferus Gallery, where he showed 32 paintings of Campbell's soup cans, one for every flavor. Warhol sold the set of paintings to Blum for 1,000 dollars; in 1996, when the Museum of Modern Art acquired it, the set was valued at 15 million dollars. This work exemplified the movement's aim to use images of popular culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any culture, most often through the use of irony. Warhol attempted to take pop beyond an artistic style to a lifestyle, and his work often displays a lack of human affectation that dispenses with the irony and parody of many of his peers. Art critic Arthur Danto once called Warhol the nearest thing to a philosophical genius the history of art has produced. His Campbell's Tomato Juice Box, 1964, a plain-looking box with the Campbell's label sitting on the ground, demonstrated how product labeling and logos figure prominently in the imagery chosen by pop artists. Even the labeling on the outside of a shipping box containing food items for retail has been used as subject matter in pop art. Warhol's use of mechanical means of reproduction, such as silkscreen ink, connected his works to topical events in everyday America and challenged the traditions of fine art.
Roy Lichtenstein's work, and its use of parody, probably defines the basic premise of pop art better than any other. Selecting the old-fashioned comic strip as subject matter, Lichtenstein produces a hard-edged, precise composition that documents while also parodying in a soft manner. His best known works, such as Drowning Girl from 1963, were appropriated from the lead story in DC Comics' Secret Hearts number 83. Drowning Girl is part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. His work features thick outlines, bold colors, and Ben-Day dots to represent certain colors, as if created by photographic reproduction. Lichtenstein said that abstract expressionists put things down on the canvas and responded to what they had done, to the color positions and sizes. His style looked completely different, but the nature of putting down lines pretty much is the same; his just don't come out looking calligraphic, like Pollock's or Kline's. Pop art merges popular and mass culture with fine art while injecting humor, irony, and recognizable imagery into the mix. The paintings of Lichtenstein, like those of Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, and others, share a direct attachment to the commonplace image of American popular culture, but also treat the subject in an impersonal manner clearly illustrating the idealization of mass production.
Happenings And The Store
In the 1960s, Claes Oldenburg, who became associated with the pop art movement, created many happenings, which were performance art-related productions of that time. The name he gave to his own productions was Ray Gun Theater. The cast of colleagues in his performances included artists Lucas Samaras, Tom Wesselmann, Carolee Schneemann, Öyvind Fahlström, and Richard Artschwager, along with dealer Annina Nosei, art critic Barbara Rose, and screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer. His first wife, Patty Mucha, who sewed many of his early soft sculptures, was a constant performer in his happenings. This brash, often humorous, approach to art was at great odds with the prevailing sensibility that, by its nature, art dealt with profound expressions or ideas. In December 1961, he rented a store on Manhattan's Lower East Side to house The Store, a month-long installation he had first presented at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York, stocked with sculptures roughly in the form of consumer goods. The 1960s saw Oldenburg, Jim Dine, and Tom Wesselmann have their first shows in the Judson Gallery in 1959 and 1960, and later in 1960 through 1964 along with James Rosenquist, George Segal, and others at the Green Gallery on 57th Street in Manhattan. The American Supermarket, organized by the Bianchini Gallery in 1964, was presented as a typical small supermarket environment, except that everything in it, the produce, canned goods, meat, posters on the wall, etc., was created by prominent pop artists of the time, including Apple, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Wesselmann, Oldenburg, and Johns.
Global Echoes And Counter Cultures
Pop art evolved differently across the globe, adapting to local political and cultural contexts. In France, Nouveau réalisme referred to an artistic movement founded in 1960 by the art critic Pierre Restany and the artist Yves Klein during the first collective exposition in the Apollinaire gallery in Milan. The group initially chose Nice, on the French Riviera, as its home base since Klein and Arman both originated there. In Spain, the study of pop art is associated with the new figurative, which arose from the roots of the crisis of informalism. Eduardo Arroyo could be said to fit within the pop art trend, on account of his interest in the environment, his critique of our media culture which incorporates icons of both mass media communication and the history of painting, and his scorn for nearly all established artistic styles. The Spanish artist who could be considered most authentically part of pop art is Alfredo Alcaín, because of the use he makes of popular images and empty spaces in his compositions. In Russia, pop-esque pieces emerged in the 1970s, likely a result of Russia's postwar political climate, which closely supervised artistic expression. Russia's version of pop art was Soviet-themed and was referred to as Sots Art. Compared to western pop art, it functioned as a counter-culture reaction against the state's approved art-movements. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Russian pop art took on another form, epitomized by Dmitri Vrubel and his painting My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love.
The Supermarket And The Moon
The 1960s marked a period of rapid expansion for pop art, with exhibitions that challenged the very nature of where art could exist. The American Supermarket, organized by the Bianchini Gallery in 1964, was presented as a typical small supermarket environment, except that everything in it, the produce, canned goods, meat, posters on the wall, etc., was created by prominent pop artists of the time, including Billy Apple, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Wesselmann, Oldenburg, and Johns. This project was recreated in 2002 as part of the Tate Gallery's Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture. In Belgium, pop art was represented to some extent by Paul Van Hoeydonck, whose sculpture Fallen Astronaut was left on the Moon during one of the Apollo missions. Internationally recognized artists such as Marcel Broodthaers, Evelyne Axell, and Panamarenko were indebted to the pop art movement. Broodthaers's great influence was George Segal. Another well-known artist, Roger Raveel, mounted a birdcage with a real live pigeon in one of his paintings. By the end of the 1960s and early 1970s, pop art references disappeared from the work of some of these artists when they started to adopt a more critical attitude towards America because of the Vietnam War's increasingly gruesome character. Panamarenko, however, has retained the irony inherent in the pop art movement up to the present day. Evelyne Axell from Namur was a prolific pop-artist in the 1964 to 1972 period. Axell was one of the first female pop artists, had been mentored by Magritte, and her best-known painting is Ice Cream.
The Pop Art Legacy
By 1968, the São Paulo 9 Exhibition, Environment U.S.A.: 1957 to 1967, featured the Who's Who of pop art. Considered as a summation of the classical phase of the American pop art period, the exhibit was curated by William Seitz. The artists included Edward Hopper, James Gill, Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and Tom Wesselmann. Pop art has never completely left the Italian art scene, undergoing numerous variations over time and constantly changing in form and content. In the early 2000s, for example, the Sicilian artist Arrigo Musti created Impopular Art. Recently, an undercurrent called Pop Symbolism, mainly consisting of digital art, has begun to spread, especially in the North. In New Zealand, pop art has predominantly flourished since the 1990s, and is often connected to Kiwiana. Kiwiana is a pop-centered, idealized representation of classically Kiwi icons, such as meat pies, kiwifruit, tractors, jandals, Four Square supermarkets. The inherent campness of this is often subverted to signify cultural messages. Dick Frizzell is a famous New Zealand pop artist, known for using older Kiwiana symbols in ways that parody modern culture. Michel Tuffery's famous work Pisupo Lua Afe, Corned Beef 2000, represents a bull constructed out of processed food cans known as pisupo. It is an unusual work of western pop art because Tuffery includes themes of neocolonialism and racism against non-western cultures, signified by the food cans the work is made of, which represent economic dependence brought on by the west. The undeniable indigenous viewpoint makes it stand out against more common non-indigenous works of pop art.