Pop Art - 1955-1975

Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art presented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular culture such as advertising, news, etc. In Pop art, material is sometimes visually removed from its known context, isolated, and/or combined with unrelated material. The concept of pop art refers not as much to the art itself as to the attitudes that led to it.

 

Andy Warhol, Campbell's Tomato Juice Box, 1964.

 Pop art employs aspects of mass culture, such as advertising, comic books and mundane cultural objects. It is widely interpreted as a reaction to the then-dominant ideas of abstract expressionism, as well as an expansion upon them. And due to its utilization of found objects and images it is similar to Dada. Pop art is aimed to employ images of popular as opposed to elitist culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any given culture, most often through the use of irony.It is also associated with the artists' use of mechanical means of reproduction or rendering techniques.The subject matter is far from traditional "high art" themes of morality, mythology, and classic history; rather, Pop artists celebrated commonplace objects and people of everyday life, in this way seeking to elevate popular culture to the level of fine art. Perhaps owing to the incorporation of commercial images, Pop art has become one of the most recognizable styles of modern art.

Artists:  Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Jones, Tom Wesselmann, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg.

Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol (August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American artist who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, celebrity culture and advertisement that flourished by the 1960s. After a successful career as a commercial illustrator, Warhol became a renowned and sometimes controversial artist. The Andy Warhol Museum in his native city,Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, holds an extensive permanent collection of art and archives. It is the largest museum in the United States dedicated to a single artist.

Warhol's art encompassed many forms of media, including hand drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, silk screening, sculpture, film, and music. He was also a pioneer in computer-generated art using Amiga computers that were introduced in 1984, two years before his death. He foundedInterview Magazine and was the author of numerous books, including The Philosophy of Andy Warhol and Popism: The Warhol Sixties. He is also notable as a gay man who lived openly as such before the gay liberation movement. His studio, The Factory, was a famous gathering place that brought together distinguished intellectuals, drag queens, playwrights, Bohemian street people, Hollywood celebrities, and wealthy patrons.

Warhol has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions, books, and feature and documentary films. He coined the widely used expression "15 minutes of fame". Many of his creations are very collectible and highly valuable. The highest price ever paid for a Warhol painting is US$100 million for a 1963 canvas titled Eight Elvises. The private transaction was reported in a 2009 article in The Economist, which described Warhol as the "bellwether of the art market".Warhol's works include some of the most expensive paintings ever sold.

Roy Lichtenstein: Drowning Girl

Drowning Girl is a bright example of Roy Lichtenstein's comic style. It was derived from the lead story in DC Comics' Secret Hearts #83. Drowning girl is a large size picture, which is notable for its content, what is more it is colorfully and texturally rich. The girl's head is enormously large. It is located in the foreground of the picture, surrounded by threatening waves. The girl is sinking under the water and a speech balloon brilliantly conveys her thoughts. The girl would rather drown than call for Brad to come help her. This phrase is humorous and tragic as well. The colors used in the painting work together.  Benday dots, a form of coloring, which was also frequently used in comic books, can also be found in this work. The use of such strong colors and textures shows the melodrama of the situation. For this work the artist used oil and Magna paint. The picture makes you feel hopeless and anxious. The title of the picture coincides with the experienced emotions. Drowning Girl is considered to be an excellent example of Pop Art.

Op Art - 1950-1970

Op art, also known as optical art, is a style of visual art that makes use of optical illusions. "Optical art is a method of painting concerning the interaction between illusion and picture plane, between understanding and seeing." Op art works are abstract, with many of the better known pieces made in red and yellow . When the viewer looks at them, the impression is given of movement, hidden images, flashing and vibration, patterns, or alternatively, of swelling or warping.

Movement in Squares, by Bridget Riley 1961

Op art is a perceptual experience related to how vision functions. It is a dynamic visual art, stemming from a discordant figure-ground relationship that causes the two planes to be in a tense and contradictory juxtaposition. Op art is created in two primary ways. The first, and best known method, is the creation of effects through the use of pattern and line. Another reaction that occurs is that the lines create after- images of certain colors due to how the retina receives and processes light. As Goethe demonstrates in his treatise Theory of Colours, at the edge where light and dark meet, color arises because lightness and darkness are the two central properties in the creation of color.

Artists: Victor Vasarely, John McHale, Arnold Alfred Schmidt, Richard Anuszkiewicz, Alexander Semeonovitch Liberman.

Cobra Art 1948-1951

COBRA Art Movement 

COBRA (or CoBrA) was a European avant-garde movement active from 1948 to 1951. The name was coined in 1948 by Christian Dotremont from the initials of the members' home cities: Copenhagen (Co), Brussels (Br), Amsterdam (A).

  COBRA, Expressionist group of painters whose name is derived from the first letters of the three northern European cities—Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam—that were the homes of its members. The first of the group’s two large exhibitions, organized by the Danish painter Asger Jorn, was held in 1949 at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the second exhibition was held in 1951 at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Liège, Belgium. COBRA included among its members Karel Appel, Corneille (Cornelis Guillaume van Beverloo), Constant (Nieuwenhuis), Pierre Alechinsky, Lucebert (Lubertus Jacobus Swaanswijk), and Jean Atlan.

   Influenced by poetry, film, folk art, children’s art, and primitive art, the semiabstract canvases by these artists display brilliant colour and spontaneous, violent brushwork that is akin to American Action painting. The human figure, treated in a wildly distorted, Expressionistic manner, is a frequent motif in their art. COBRA had a great impact on the development of subsequent European Abstract Expressionism. 

   Their working method was based on spontaneity and experiment, and they drew their inspiration in particular from children’s drawings, from primitive art forms and from the work of Paul Klee and Joan Miró.

                                                             Le Bruit de la Chute, 1974-75

Participants in COBRA included ( only a part ) :

 Else Alfelt (1910–1974)

 Jean-MichelAtlan (1913–1960)

 Ejler Bille (1910–2004)

 Pol Bury (1922–2005)

 Jacques Calonne (born 1930)

 Hugo Claus (1929–2008)