Pop Art

Pop art was a visual artistic movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in England and in parallel in the late 1950's in the United States. Pop art is one of the major art movements of the Twentieth Century. more...

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Characterized by themes and techniques drawn from popular mass culture, such as advertising and comic books, pop art is widely interpreted as either a reaction to the then-dominant ideas of abstract expressionism or an expansion upon them. Pop art, like pop music, aimed to employ images of popular as opposed to elitist culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any given culture. Pop art at times targeted a broad audience, and often claimed to do so. However, much of pop art is considered very academic, as the unconventional organizational practices used often make it difficult for some to comprehend. Pop art and Minimalism are considered to be the last Modern art movements and thus the precursors to Contemporary art or Postmodern art.

Origin of the term "pop art"

John McHale originally coined the term "Pop art" in 1954, and he initially developed the concept of Pop art. Consequently Reyner Banham called John McHale the "Father of Pop". Some texts have erroneously attributed the first use of the term to the critic Lawrence Alloway. Alloway was a good friend of McHale's, since the post war era, and both were founding members of the Independent Group, and evidently they were both discussing McHale's Pop art theories in 1954. However, Alloway was also a member of Team 12 at the TIT in 1956, but there is no reference to Alloway using the term Pop art in his exhibit in which he participated with Geoffrey Holroyd and Toni del Renzio. Nor is there any reference to the specific use of the word Pop art in Alloway's subsequent published writings in 1956-59.

McHale had thoroughly briefed Richard Hamilton on the tenets of Pop art at the This is Tomorrow (TIT) exhibit at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. Several months later, drawing on McHale's ideas, Hamilton defined Pop art in an unsent letter, as: popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamerous, and Big Business, stressing its everyday, commonplace values. This unsent letter with list was brought to the public attention by Hamilton in a publication almost twenty-five years after the advent of the TIT.

In the beginning the term Pop art was closely associated with McHale's concepts and signature works and his Independent Group discussions at the ICA. The term and his concepts gradually picked up general currency with other IG members and were further elaborated on within the ICA . The first to disclose in general terms what was occurring within the ICA mileau on the subject of Pop art was Reyner Banham in an article for an Italian art journal. This was followed by Lawrence Alloway's articles which did not use the specific term Pop art but began to outline some of its concepts in very general terms. Many of the ICA members became cognizant of the term Pop art but tended to avoid the rubric of Pop art when applied to their own work. Artists such as Eduardo Paolozzi, and architects such as Alison and Peter Smithson tended to see themselves as Brutalist artists and architects. Artist like Richard Hamilton, who was one of Britain's foremost innovative early Installation artists, at first resisted McHale's Pop art concepts and work, and that is why there was some falling out over the design direction and Team 2 installation at the TIT. That is also part of the reason McHale waited until his return from Yale in mid 1956 to London to provide on site most of the Pop art work for the Team 2 installation at the TIT. However, Hamilton later on after the advent of the TIT, began to appreciate the merits of the Pop art concept and idiom and so he became an innovate Pop artist in his own right and developed the Pop art expression in his own unique style. McHale was creating his Pop art and working for commercial clients such as Revlon, and J. Walter Thompson, and teaching design briefly at University of Cambridge so his ideas were being disseminated through these venues. Many of the ICA members were also teaching at the various art schools in London and this disseminated the idea of Pop art among the next generation of creative practitioners in Britain. Meanwhile, Alloway was commissioned to work for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in the USA in 1962, so he left England for America. As a result, Alloway in the 1960's started to publish and lecture on Pop art and apply the concept to rather similar artistic developments that were separately emerging in America since the mid to late 1950s. From there the term was picked up in art circles and by the general press and applied to both British and American art movements. Thus the pop art movement gathered momentum from the mid 1950's through into the 1960's, and was widely recognized by the mid 1960s.

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