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ART POP

CONTENTS 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . WHAT? 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . MESSAGE 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . WHY POP? 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ADVERTISEMENT 5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . THE RETURN 6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . INSPIRATION 7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . BIBLIOGRAPHY

W WHHATT ? A Pop art started with the New York artists Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, and Claes Oldenburg, all of whom drew on popular imagery and were actually part of an international phenomenon. They sought to explore popular culture and remove it from its elitist cocoon by using elements found in American pop culture: westerns, fiction, etc. Perhaps owing to the incorporation of commercial images, Pop art has become one of the most recog- nizable styles of modern art. 1

MESSAGE Pop Art was nothing more than the art world’s response to the rise of entertainment. Television, games, spending money… there were so many ways to pass the time in this new society. Art faced fierce competition and it reacted by imitating the conventions of popu- lar culture. Pop artists believed everything is inter-connected, and therefore sought to make those connections literal in their artwork. 2

WHY POP? The term was coined by John McHale and used for the first time by Lawrence Alloway in 1955 to refer to popular art. Pop Art was the art of popular or “material” culture and was a revolt against the status quo and the traditional views of what art should be. It was a new form of “popular” art that was low cost and mass produced. POPULAR ART 3

ADVERTISEMENT Pop Art often used images from advertising and the media as well as symbols: images that we come across very often and that educate us, symbols that regulate our lives. We are all familiar with the works of Andy Warhol and his “Camp- bell’s” soups replicated in various colours. Advertising was a great source of inspiration for Pop Art, but later on adverts themselves drew inspiration from Pop Art. 4

THE RETURN Pop Art also meant the return of silkscreen printing. A printing technique that places a stencil between the ink and the medium, silkscreen printing found its place again in the art world; this was a logical flow of events. Artists experimented in a world in which nothing was one of a kind anymore: ob- jects were mass produced, as were images. Uniqueness was abandoned and replaced by mass production. In addition to using ele- ments of popular culture, Pop Art artists replicated these images many times, in differ- ent colours and different sizes… something never before seen in the history of art. 5

INSPIRATION Pop Art is an artistic movement, of course, but it is much more than that. It is an entire generation that made cynical observations about society, with style and humour. However, “fine” art was only the sounding board for these observations because, at the time, many fields drew inspiration from Pop Art. The rock group “Velvet Underground”, for example, asked Andy Warhol to design their al- bum covers.It is this casual and critical attitude that makes Pop Art “irreproachable”, because ultimately it only comments on changes in society while also taking responsibility for them. 6

BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. https://www.theartstory.org/movement/pop-art/ 2. https://blog.artsper.com/en/a-closer-look/ 7

You need to let the little things that would ordinarily bore you suddenly thrill you. - Andy Warhol School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi