Information about the movement Pop Art was the visual art movement that characterized a sense of optimism

m during the post war consumer boom of the 1950's and 1960's. It coincided with the globalization of pop music and youth culture, personified by Elvis and the Beatles. Pop Art was brash, young and fun and hostile to the artistic establishment. It included different styles of painting and sculpture from various countries, but what they all had in common was an interest in mass-media, mass-production and mass-culture.

The word 'POP' was first coined in 1954, by the British art critic Lawrence Alloway, to describe a new type of art that was inspired by the imagery of popular culture. Alloway, alongside the artists Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi became the forerunners to British Pop art. Main features of the movement It allowed for large scale artworks like Abstract Expressionism, but drew upon more Dadaist elements. Dadaism explored some of the same topics, but pop art replaced the destructive, satirical, and anarchic elements of the Dada movement with a reverence for mass culture and consumerism. Graphic Style: Clearly defined shapes and colours with hard edges Everyday Products and Brands: including foodstuffs, cars and images from advertising and films. Collage No Perspective: Flat two-dimensional works are very common. Mechanical Techniques: silk-screen printing was used to create different versions of the same image. Pop artists also liked to satirize objects, sometimes enlarging those objects to gigantic proportions Famous pieces

Main representatives of Pop Art Richard Hamilton (1922 2011) was a painter and collage artist. He was one of the first creators of Pop Art. Hamilton, who was born in London, England, took evening art classes before studying painting at the Royal Academy School in 1938. He left school to work as an industrial designer. Returning to the Academy in 1946, Hamilton was later expelled for not following the directions of his instructors. He continued his education at Sade School of Art, in London, from 1948 to 1955. Starting in 1948, Hamilton found himself heavily influenced by the works of James Joyce and Marcel Duchamp Hamilton found himself focusing more on everyday popular culture and he began to produce work that defined that culture in his own words , such as "Popular, Transient, Expendable, Low Cost, Mass Produced, Young, Witty, Sexy, Gimmicky, Glamorous, and Big Business."

Swingeing London

Beatles' White Album

 Sir Eduardo Paolozzi (19242005) British sculptor, collagist, printmaker, filmmaker and writer. Born of Italian parents, he attended Edinburgh College of Art in 1943 with a view to becoming a commercial artist. After brief military service, in 1944 he attended St Martin's School of Art in London, and from 1945 to 1947 he studied sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art. In the late 1940s he made various sculptures inspired by Surrealism, and also produced a number of collages, which blend the incongruous juxtapositions of Surrealism with Paolozzi's interest in images of modern machinery. Paolozzi was co-founder of the "Independent Group" in London in 1952/53, which discussed thoughts of including trivial culture and that way gave decisive impulses for the development of English Pop-Art.

Bunk!

 Andy Warhol (1928 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.

Roy Fox Lichtenstein (1923 1997) was an American pop artist. During the 1960s, along with Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and James Rosenquist among others, he became a leading figure in the new art movement. His work defined the basic premise of pop art better than any other through parody. Favoring the comic strip as his main inspiration, Lichtenstein produced hard-edged, precise compositions that documented while it parodied often in a tongue-incheek humorous manner. His work was heavily influenced by both popular advertising and the comic book style. He described pop art as, "not 'American' painting but actually industrial painting".[3] His paintings were exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City.

Spray

Whaam!

Drowning Girl (1963)Roy Lichtenstein Oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas 67 5/8 x 66 3/4" (171.6 x 169.5 cm)

Drowning Girl (also known as Secret Hearts or I Don't Care! I'd Rather Sink) is a 1963 painting with oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas by Roy Lichtenstein. Utilizing the conventions of comic book art, a thought bubble conveys the thoughts of the figure, while Ben-Day dots echo the effect of the mechanized printing process. It is one of the most representative paintings of the pop art movement, and part of the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection since 1971. It is one of several Lichtenstein works that mentions a hero named Brad who is absent from the picture. Both the graphical and narrative elements of the work are significantly cropped from the original source image. The silk-screened Ben Day dots of the image reference the low-budget techniques used in comic book reproductions, collapsing the difference between high art and more popular media. The woman in his image shows an image of distress on her face and despair in her posture. Indeed, with such a posture, the dots on her body, like many Pop devices, advertise her body. Here Lichtenstein has transformed his Ben Day dots into a playful sign of her own personal battle with identity. Imagine yourself a woman in the 1960s. They are denied basic rights, trapped in the home for life, and discriminated against in the workplace. Then the 1960s came along with it, the thought that women could have a say in their government, or that they could perhaps leave home without feeling guilty about leaving their children alone, and that they could receive a job and earn wages just like men. The womens liberation movement of the 1960s helped all these changes to come about, through its record number of policies and radical ways. Most women feminists were radicals. They formed groups, which researched to find the root problem and an end to the barriers of segregation.

Since the presence of the media displayed beauty as the only way for happiness, the idea that womens only importance was for their bodies became more widespread. This media is well portrayed in Drowning Girl as Lichtenstein depicts the helpless woman as an image of beauty. However, women learned that they were worth more than just looks, and took measures to overcome the medias hype about womens beauty. Protests helped women claim national attention toward their struggles. Protests like the example explained in the pain felt tears of the drowning girl. As she says, Id rather sink than ask Brad for help. Its as though the girl is sinking in her sorrow; the disappointment for her situation, at home, in the workplace, or in society as a whole. It may be possible that she speaks for the population of all women. Instead of calling to her husband Brad for help, radical women would prefer to drown in their despair, loneliness, misfortune, struggle

http://www.artyfactory.com/art_appreciation/art_movements/pop_art.htm http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/popart/ http://www.stylecube.co.uk/article-Pop-Art.php http://www.artnet.com/artists/richard-hamilton/

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/sir-eduardo-paolozzi-1738 http://www.pinterest.com/search/pins/?q=andy%20warhol&rs=ac&len=4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Warhol http://nymuseum.com/deli/roy-lichtenstein/ http://www.researchomatic.com/essay/The-Womens-Movement-In-The-1960s-31992.aspx