Pop Art

Pop Art

Traditionally, popular culture and high culture did not dine in the same restaurants, and neither go to the same concerts, or look at the same art and artists. Pop art however, had emerged and with it, it had hanged that controversy by blurring the cultural divide between the two types of social classes.

The Pop Art movement began in England, but it was always about the United States, where impartiality had the deepest roots and where throwaway culture came of age first. This was to say that since the USA was at the height of industrial manufacture and the limelight of all entertainment, it had attracted Pop Art most strongly.

The first Pop Art image which was a collage composed in 1956 by Richard Hamilton was called 'Just What Is It That Makes Today's Home So Different, So Appealing. This composition celebrates and parodies the United States’ cultural idea of the United Kingdom. Even the title has the element of an American advertisement. The home Richard Hamilton has fabricated is stocked with the latest American conveniences such as the reel-to-reel tape recorder, canned ham, a Ford Motors lampshade, a cartoon-strip poster, a tasteless orange coach, a TV featuring an attractive woman on the telephone, and portable vacuum cleaner with a super long attachment hose.

Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol lived from 1928 till 1987.

Andy Warhol’s work explores the trend of celebrates and the way a person can be inspired by, or lost behind, their own picture. The loss of the uniquness and creativity is displaced by copies, and the central fixation of the Post Modernism art of which Pop art was a predecessor. Andy Warhol’s diptych was created in the months after the suicide of Marilyn Monroe. It is a descovery of the way personalities, after dying, can achieve ‘immortality’ through endless of replication pictures in advertising, and magazines.

One can say that Andy Warhol looked at this life backwords, and that his art attracts people to see and do the same as he does. In his own book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, he wrote:

‘People sometimes say that the way thing happen in the movies is unreal, but actually it’s the way things happen to you in life that’s unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you it’s like watching television – you don’t feel anything.’

  

Marilyn Diptych, 1962, Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol’s paintings give the audience an inside-out image of famous culture by elevating the ordinary ‘a soup can, and box of Brillo pads’ into an art an artifact. With Andy Warhol’s first Pop art tests which were paintings of Campbell’s soup, Coca-Cola bottles and Brillo pads, Warhol basically changed super markets shelves into art galleries.

Andy Warhol’s confident blend of business and art developed out of his early success as a graphic design artist and profitable illustrator in New York.

Although Pop Art was most effective fifty years ago when entertainment and manufacture product had to become mainstream and popular in order to sell, colours, and back outline still attract many young graphic designers as a choice of style.

Bibliography:

·        Stephenie Little, …isms Understanding Art, 2011, Herbert Press, London

·        Jesse Bryant Wilder, Art History for Dummies, 2007, Wiley Publishing, Indianapolis