I Was a Rich Man's Plaything (1947)

Artist: Eduardo Paolozzi

Artwork description & Analysis: Paolozzi, a Scottish sculptor and artist,

was a key member of the British post-war avant-garde. His collage I
Was a Rich Man's Plaything proved an important foundational work for
the Pop art movement, combining pop culture documents like a pulp
fiction novel cover, a Coca-Cola advertisement, and a military
recruitment advertisement. The work exemplifies the slightly darker tone
of British Pop art, which reflected more upon the gap between the
glamour and affluence present in American popular culture and the
economic and political hardship of British reality. As a member of the
loosely associated Independent Group, Paolozzi emphasized the impact
of technology and mass culture on high art. His use of collage
demonstrates the influence of Surrealist and Dadaist photomontage,
which Paolozzi implemented to recreate the barrage of mass media
images experienced in everyday life.
Collage - Tate Modern, London

Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different,

So Appealing? (1956)
Artist: Richard Hamilton

Artwork description & Analysis: Hamilton's 1956 collage was a seminal

piece for the evolution of Pop art and is often cited as the very first work
of Pop art. Created for the exhibition This is Tomorrow at London's
Whitechapel Gallery in 1956, Hamilton's image was used both in the
catalogue for the exhibition and on posters advertising it. The collage
presents viewers with an updated Adam and Eve (a body-builder and a
burlesque dancer) surrounded by all the conveniences modern life
provided, including a vacuum cleaner, canned ham, and television.
Constructed using a variety of cutouts from magazine advertisements,
Hamilton created a domestic interior scene that both lauded
consumerism and critiqued the decadence that was emblematic of the
American post-war economic boom years.
Collage - Kunsthalle Tubingen, Germany
President Elect (1960-61)
Artist: James Rosenquist

Artwork description & Analysis: Like many Pop artists, Rosenquist was
fascinated by the popularization of political and cultural figures in mass
media. In his painting President Elect, the artist depicts John F.
Kennedy's face amidst an amalgamation of consumer items, including a
yellow Chevrolet and a piece of cake. Rosenquist created a collage with
the three elements cut from their original mass media context, and then
photo-realistically recreated them on a monumental scale. As
Rosenquist explains, "The face was from Kennedy's campaign poster. I
was very interested at that time in people who advertised themselves.
Why did they put up an advertisement of themselves? So that was his
face. And his promise was half a Chevrolet and a piece of stale cake."
The large-scale work exemplifies Rosenquist's technique of combining
discrete images through techniques of blending, interlocking, and
juxtaposition, as well as his skill at including political and social
commentary using popular imagery.
Oil on masonite - Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

Pastry Case, I (1961-62)

Artist: Claes Oldenburg

Artwork description & Analysis: Oldenburg is known as one of the few

American Pop art sculptors, notorious for his playfully absurd creations
of food and inanimate objects. The collection of works in Pastry Case,
I were originally displayed in the artist's famous 1961 installation
titled The Store, located on New York's Lower East Side. For the project,
Oldenburg created plaster sculptural objects including a strawberry
shortcake and a candied apple. In addition to replicating consumer
items, Oldenburg organized his installation like a typical variety shop
and sold his items at low prices, commenting on the interrelation
between art objects and commodities. Although sold as if they were
mass-produced, the sculptures in The Store were carefully hand-built
and the lavish, expressive brushstrokes that cover the items in Pastry
Case, I seem to mock the seriousness of Abstract Expressionism, a
common theme in Pop art. Oldenburg combines the evocative
expressionist gesture with the commodity item in a highly ironic
environment.
Painted plaster sculptures on ceramic plates, metal platter and
cups in glass-and-metal case - Museum of Modern Art, New
York

BLAM (1962)
Artist: Roy Lichtenstein

Artwork description & Analysis: Lichtenstein took the image used

for BLAM from a 1962 edition of the comic book All American Men of
War (#89) by Russ Heath. Lichtenstein's painting is not quite an exact
replica of Heath's image, but it would be easy to confuse the two upon
first glance, as Lichtenstein altered the image only very subtly. One of
his many paintings that appropriate subject matter from popular comics,
Lichtenstein defined his career by experimenting with the boundaries
between high and low art, which raised such questions about the nature
of culture and originality without providing any definitive answers. As
with the rest of Pop art, it is unclear whether Lichtenstein is applauding
the comic book image, and the general cultural sphere to which it
belongs, or critiquing it, leaving interpretation up to the
viewer. BLAM and similar works were painted using the Ben-Day dot
technique, borrowed from comic book printing. Thus, not only is the
larger image itself a reproduction, but it was also painted using a
repetitive, almost mechanical technique.
Oil on canvas - Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT

Campbell's Soup Cans (1962)

Artist: Andy Warhol

Artwork description & Analysis: Warhol's iconic series of Campbell's

Soup Cans paintings were never meant to be celebrated for their form
or compositional style, like that of the abstractionists. What made these
works significant was Warhol's co-opting of universally recognizable
imagery, such as a Campbell's soup can, Mickey Mouse, or the face of
Marilyn Monroe, and depicting it as a mass-produced item, but within a
fine art context. In that sense, Warhol wasn't just emphasizing popular
imagery, but rather providing commentary on how people have come to
perceive these things in modern times: as commodities to be bought
and sold, identifiable as such with one glance. This early series was
hand-painted, but Warhol switched to screenprinting shortly afterwards,
favoring the mechanical technique for his mass culture imagery. 100
canvases of campbell's soup cans made up his first solo exhibition at
the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, and put Warhol on the art world map
almost immediately, forever changing the face and content of modern
art.
Synthetic polymer on thirty-two canvases - The Museum of Modern
Art, New York

Bunnies (1966)
Artist: Sigmar Polke

Artwork description & Analysis: After Polke co-founded Capitalist

Realism in 1963 in Dusseldorf, Germany, with Gerhard Richter and
Konrad Leug, he began to create paintings of popular culture, evoking
both genuine nostalgia for the images and mild cynicism about the state
of the German economy. He began simulating the dot patterns of
commercial four-color printing (Raster dots) around the same time as
Lichtenstein started replicating Ben-Day dots on his canvases.
In Bunnies, Polke uses an image from the Playboy Club depicting four
of their "bunnies" in costume. By recreating the Raster dot printing
technique in this painting, Polke disrupts the mass-marketing of sexual
appeal, because the closer the viewer gets to the work, the less they
see. Bunnies and the rest of Polke's Raster dot paintings, do not invite a
deep, personal identification with the image but rather the images
become allegories for the self as it lost amidst the flood of commecial
imagery. The dissonance between the inviting sexuality of the
appropriated image of the Playboy bunnies and the distancing effect of
the Raster dots echoes the interplay of feelings and emotions felt by the
artist, both yearning for the mass-culture advertised life and repelled by
it at the same time. Polke's vision of popular culture is far more critical
than any of the New York artists, and is rooted in the skeptical attitude
held by the Capitalist Realists. Rather than the "cool" detachment of
New York, Polke cleverly critiques popular culture and how it affects the
individual using the same mass-market image-making techniques.
Oil on cavas - Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Washington, D.C.
Standard Station (1966)
Artist: Ed Ruscha

Artwork description & Analysis: The printmaker, painter, and

photographer Ed Ruscha was an important proponent of West Coast
Pop art that blended the imagery of Hollywood with colorful renderings
of commercial culture and the landscape of the southwest. The gasoline
station is one of Ruscha's most iconic motifs, appearing repeatedly in
his book Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963), a documentation of
deadpan photographs from a road trip through the American
Southwestern countryside. In Standard Station, the artist transforms the
banal image of the gasoline station into an emblematic symbol of
American consumer culture. Here, through the medium of
screenprinting, Ruscha flattens the perspective into a single plane to
create an image that evokes the aesthetic of commercial advertising.
The work also demonstrates Ruscha's early forays into experiments
with language and textual interplay, which would be a principal concern
in much of his later, more conceptually oriented work.
Screenprint - Museum of Modern Art, New York

A Bigger Splash (1967)

Artist: David Hockney

Artwork description & Analysis: This large canvas measures

approximately 94 by 94 inches, derived from a photograph of a
swimming pool Hockney had seen in a pool manual, Hockney was
intrigued by the idea that a painting might recapture a fleeting event
frozen in a photograph. As he said: “I loved the idea of painting this
thing that lasts for two seconds: it takes me two weeks to paint this
event that lasts for two seconds.” The dynamism of the splash contrasts
strongly with the static and rigid geometry of the house, the pool edge,
the palm trees and the striking yellow diving board, all carefully
arranged in a grid containing the splash. This gives the painting a
disjointed effect that is absolutely intentional, one of the hallmarks of
Hockney’s style. The effect of stylization and artificiality draws on the
aesthetic vocabulary of Pop art.
Acrylic on canvas - Tate, London

Cut with a Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar

Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany (1919)
Movement: Dada
Artist: Hannah Höch

Artwork description & Analysis: Hannah Höch is known for her collages
and photomontages composed from newspaper and magazine clippings
as well as sewing and craft designs often pulled from publications she
contributed to at the Ullstein Press. As part of Club Dada in Berlin, Hoch
unabashedly critiqued German culture by literally slicing apart its
imagery and reassembling it into vivid, disjointed, emotional depictions
of modern life. The title of this work, refers to the decadence, corruption,
and sexism of pre-war German culture. Larger and more political than
her typical montages, this fragmentary anti-art work highlights the
polarities of Weimer politics by juxtaposing images of establishment
people with intellectuals, radicals, entertainers, and artists.
Recognizable faces include Marx and Lenin, Pola Negri, and Kathe
Kollwitz. The map of Europe that identifies the countries in which
women had already achieved the right to vote suggests that the newly
enfranchised women of Germany would soon "cut" through the male
"beer-belly" culture. Her inclusion of commercially produced designs in
her montages broke down distinctions between modern art and crafts,
and between the public sphere and domesticity.
Cut paper collage - National Gallery, State Museum of Berlin

White Flag (1955)

Movement: Neo-Dada
Artist: Jasper Johns

Artwork description & Analysis: Johns' use of newspaper and other

media dipped in encaustic made each mark distinct and visually linked
his work with the Abstract Expressionists, despite the very different
processes that were involved. Rather than creating an abstract work like
the action painters before him, Johns relied upon the images and signs
common to American culture. He shifted the focus from the artist's mark
to the interplay of emblems, language, and the media through his use of
found objects embedded within the hardened wax "brushstrokes" that
constitute the larger image of the American flag. Johns emphasized his
interest in semiotics through his use of this familiar symbol and relied
upon the viewer's familiarity with the flag to imbue the work with
meaning. Johns, who has referred to his paintings as "facts," does not
provide an interpretation or critique of the media, language, or signs he
paints - he instead relies upon the viewers to derive their own analyses.
Through his revolutionary use of mass media and his focus on familiar
signs, Johns moved the course of modern art away from formalist
abstraction and towards Pop's attention to mass-produced objects,
Conceptual art's focus on language, and, ultimately, to postmodernism's
deconstruction of language.
Encaustic, oil, newsprint and charcoal on canvas - Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York

The Woman Eating (1971)

Movement: Photorealism
Artist: Duane Hanson

Artwork description & Analysis: This sculpture is a life-size woman

seated at a cafeteria table, plainly dressed, with her bags and packages
by her side. The woman is dressed in actual clothes and her belongs,
also, are real objects. Overweight, not particularly attractive, Hanson's
statue goes against the grain of artists beautifying the female form.
Likely to fool the eye, it is only when the viewer gets up close to the
work that the tiniest of brush strokes reveal the work's artificiality.
Hanson's statues are usually located in the refined spaces of art
museums and galleries, which renders imagery of ordinary folk into fine
art. Hanson admitted to presenting a social message via his sculptures,
expressing a sense of the resignation, emptiness and loneliness of
suburban existence. Here, there is an aspect of pathos to the solitary
woman eating alone, especially if we consider that within a museum she
becomes an object of study and inadvertent stares. As with Chuck
Close, Hanson focuses on human beings as his subject matter, rather
than the reflective glass and chrome of other Photorealists. Hanson
makes his viewers question who is worthy of being an artistic subject;
what is the viewer's social relation to the statue/person and any other
association between the strange presence and us.
Polyester resin, fiberglass, polychromed in oil paint with clothes, table,
chair and accessories - Smithsonian American Art Museum,
Washington, DC
These artworks are the most important in Pop Art - that both overview
the major ideas of the movement, and highlight the greatest
achievements by each artist in Pop Art.

Beginnings
Great Britain: The Independent Group

In 1952, a gathering of artists in London calling themselves the

Independent Group began meeting regularly to discuss topics such as
mass culture's place in fine art, the found object, and science and
technology. Members included Edouardo Paolozzi, Richard Hamilton,
architects Alison and Peter Smithson, and critics Lawrence Alloway and
Reyner Banham. Britain in the early 1950s was still emerging from the
austerity of the post-war years, and its citizens were ambivalent about
American popular culture. While the group was suspicious of its
commercial character, they were enthusiastic about the rich world pop
culture seemed to promise for the future. The imagery they discussed at
length included that found in Western movies, science fiction, comic
books, billboards, automobile design, and rock and roll music.
The actual term "Pop art" has several possible origins: the first use of
the term in writing has been attributed to both Lawrence Alloway and
Alison and Peter Smithson, and alternately to Richard Hamilton, who
defined Pop in a letter, while the first artwork to incorporate the word
"Pop" was produced by Paolozzi. His collage I Was a Rich Man's
Plaything (1947) contained cut-up images of a pinup girl, Coca-Cola
logo, cherry pie, World War II bomber, and a man's hand holding a
pistol, out of which burst the world "POP!" in a puffy white cloud.

New York City: The Emergence of Neo-Dada

By the mid 1950s, the artists working in New York City faced a critical
juncture in modern art: following the Abstract Expressionists or rebel
against the strict formalism advocated by many schools of modernism.
By this time, Jasper Johns was already troubling conventions with
abstract paintings that included references to: "things the mind already
knows" - targets, flags, handprints, letters, and numbers.
Meanwhile, Robert Rauschenberg's "combines" incorporated found
objects and images, with more traditional materials like oil paint.
Similarly, Allan Kaprow's "Happenings" and the Fluxus movements
chose to incorporate aspects from the surrounding world into their art.
These artists, along with others, later became grouped in the movement
known as Neo-Dada. The now classic New York Pop art of Roy
Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, and Andy Warhol
emerged in the 1960 in the footsteps of the Neo-Dadaists.

Concepts and Styles

Once the transition from the found-object constructions of the Neo-Dada

artists to the Pop movement was complete, there was widespread
interest on the part of artists in the incorporation of popular culture into
their work. Although artists in the Independent Group in London initiated
the use of "pop" in reference to art, American artists soon followed suit
and incorporated popular culture into their artwork as well. Although the
individual styles vary widely, all of the artists maintain a commonality in
their choice of popular culture imagery as their fundamental subject.
Shortly after American Pop art arrived on the art world scene, mainland
European variants developed in the Capitalist Realist movement in
Germany and the Nouveau Réalisme movement in France.

Richard Hamilton, Edouardo Paolozzi, and the Tabular Image

The Pop art collages of Paolozzi and Hamilton convey the mixed
feelings Europeans maintained toward American popular culture; both
exalting the mass-produced objects and images while also criticizing the
excess. In his collage, Just what is it that makes today's homes so
different, so appealing? (1956), Hamilton combined images from various
mass media sources, carefully selecting each image and composing the
disparate elements of popular imagery into one coherent survey of post-
war consumer culture. The members of the Independent Group were
the first artists to present mass media imagery, acknowledging the
challenges to traditional art categories occurring in America and Britain
after 1945.
Pop Art - Art History

Mid-1950s to Early 1970s

Roy Lichtenstein (American, 1923-1997). Live Ammo (Blang!), 1962. Oil and Magna
acrylic on canvas. 68 x 80 in. (172.7 x 203.2 cm). Photo © Douglas M. Parker Studio,
Los Angeles. The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Collection, Los Angeles / © Estate of Roy
Lichtenstein

by Beth Gersh-Nesic June 10, 2017

Pop Art was born in Britain in the mid 1950s. It was the brain-child of several
young subversive artists - as most modern art tends to be. The first application of
the term Pop Art occurred during discussions among artists who called
themselves the Independent Group (IG), which was part of the Institute of
Contemporary Art in London, begun around 1952-53.
Pop Art appreciates popular culture, or what we also call “material culture.” It
does not critique the consequences of materialism and consumerism; it simply
recognizes its pervasive presence as a natural fact.

Acquiring consumer goods, responding to clever advertisements and building

more effective forms of mass communication (back then: movies, television,
newspapers and magazines) galvanized energy among young people born during
the Post-World War II generation. Rebelling against the esoteric vocabulary of
abstract art, they wanted to express their optimism after so much hardship and
privation in a youthful visual language. Pop Art celebrated the United Generation
of Shopping.

HOW LONG WAS THE MOVEMENT?

The movement was officially christened by Lawrence Alloway in his article "The
Arts and Mass Media," Architectural Record (February 1958). Art history text
books tend to claim that Richard Hamilton's Just What Is It that Makes Today's
Home So Different and So Appealing? (1956) signaled that Pop Art had arrived
on the scene. The collage appeared in This Is Tomorrow at Whitechapel Art
Gallery in 1956, so we might say that this work of art and this exhibition mark the
official beginning of the movement, even though the artists worked on Pop Art
themes earlier in their careers.

Pop Art, for the most part, completed the Modernist movement in the early
1970s, with its optimistic investment in contemporary subject matter. It also
ended the Modernism movement by holding up a mirror to contemporary
society. Once the Postmodernist generation looked hard and long into the mirror,
self-doubt took over and the party atmosphere of Pop Art faded away.

WHAT ARE THE KEY CHARACTERISTICS OF POP ART?

 Recognizable imagery, drawn from popular media and products.

 Usually very bright colors.
 Flat imagery influenced by comic books and newspaper photographs.
 Images of celebrities or fictional characters in comic books,
advertisements and fan magazines.
 In sculpture, an innovative use of media.

HISTORIC PRECEDENT:

The integration of fine art and popular culture (such as billboards, packaging and
print advertisements) began way before the 1950s. Gustave Courbet's (1855)
symbolically pandered to popular taste by including a pose taken from the
inexpensive print series called Imagerie d’Épinal which featured moralizing
scenes invented by Jean-Charles Pellerin. Every schoolboy knew these pictures
about of street life, the military and legendary characters. Did the middle class
get Courbet's drift? Maybe not, but Courbet did not care. He knew he had
invaded "high art" with a "low" art form.

Picasso used the same strategy. He joked about our love affair with shopping by
creating a woman out of a label and ad from the department Bon Marché Au Bon
Marché (1914) may not be considered the first Pop Art collage, but it certainly
planted the seeds for the movement.
ROOTS IN DADA

Marcel Duchamp pushed Picasso's consumerist ploy further by introducing the

actual mass-produced object into the exhibition: a bottle-rack, a snow shovel, a
urinal (upside down). He called these objects Ready-Mades, an anti-art
expression that belonged to the Dada movement.

NEO-DADA, OR EARLY POP ART:

Early Pop artists followed Duchamps' lead in the 1950s by returning to imagery
during the height of Abstract Expressionism and purposely selecting "low-brow"
popular imagery. They also incorporated or reproduced 3-dimension objects.
Jasper Johns' Beer Cans (1960) and Robert Rauschenburg's Bed (1955) are two
cases in point. This work was called "Neo-Dada" during its formative years.
Today, we might call it Pre-Pop Art or Early Pop Art.

BRITISH POP ART:

Independent Group (Institute of Contemporary Art)

 Richard Hamilton
 Edouardo Paolozzi
 Peter Blake
 John McHale
 Lawrence Alloway
 Peter Reyner Banham
 Richard Smith
 Jon Thompson

Young Contemporaries (Royal College of Art):

 R. B. Kitaj
 Peter Philips
 Billy Apple (Barrie Bates)
 Derek Boshier
 Patrick Canfield
 David Hockney
 Allen Jones
 Norman Toynton

AMERICAN POP ART:

Andy Warhol understood shopping and he also understood the allure of celebrity.
Together these Post-World War II obsessions drove the economy. From malls
and to People Magazine, Warhol captured an authentic American aesthetic:
packaging products and people. It was an insightful observation. Public display
ruled and everyone wanted his/her own fifteen minutes of fame.

New York Pop Art:

 Roy Lichtenstein
 Andy Warhol
 Robert Indiana
  George Brecht
 Marisol (Escobar)
 Tom Wesselmann
 Marjorie Strider
 Allan D'Arcangelo
 Ida Weber
 Claes Oldenberg - common products made out of odd materials
 George Segal - white plaster casts of bodies in everyday settings
 James Rosenquist - painting that looked like collages of advertisements
 Rosalyn Drexler - pop stars and contemporary issues.

California Pop Art:

 Billy Al Bengston
 Edward Kienholz
 Wallace Berman
 John Wesley
 Jess Collins
 Richard Pettibone
 Mel Remos
 Edward Ruscha
 Wayne Thiebaud
 Joe GoodeVon Dutch Holland
 Jim Eller
 Anthony Berlant
 Victor Debreuil
 Phillip Hefferton
 Robert O’Dowd
 James Gill
 Robert Kuntz

SOURCES:

Lippard, Lucy with Lawrence Alloway, Nicolas Cala and Nancy Marmer. Pop Art.
London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985.

Osterwald, Tilman. Pop Art.

Cologne, Germany: Taschen, 2007.

Francis, Mark and Hal Foster. Pop.

London and New York: Phaidon, 2010.

Madoff, Steven Henry, ed. Pop Art: A Critical History.

Berkeley: University of California, 1997.