pop art (redirected from pop-art)

pop art, a movement that first emerged in Great Britain at the end of the 1950s as a reaction against the seriousness of abstract expressionism. British and American pop artists employed a common imagery found in comic strips, soup cans, and Coke bottles to express formal abstract relationships. By this means they provided a meeting ground where artist and layman could come to terms with art. Incorporating techniques of sign painting and commercial art into their work, as well as commercial literary imagery, pop artists such as Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol attempted to fuse elements of popular and high culture to erase the boundaries between the two.

Bibliography

See L. Alloway, ed. Modern Dreams: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Pop Art (1988).

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Pop art

Art in which commonplace objects (such as comic strips, soup cans, road signs, and hamburgers) were used as subject matter. The Pop art movement was largely a British and American cultural phenomenon of the late 1950s and '60s. Works by such Pop artists as the Americans Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Tom Wesselman, James Rosenquist, and Robert Indiana and the Britons David Hockney and Peter Blake, among others, were characterized by their portrayal of any and all aspects of popular culture that had a powerful impact on contemporary life; their iconography—taken from television, comic books, movie magazines, and all forms of advertising—was presented emphatically and objectively and by means of the precise commercial techniques used by the media from which the iconography itself was borrowed. Some of the more striking forms that Pop art took were Lichtenstein's stylized reproductions of comic strips and Warhol's meticulously literal paintings and silk-screen prints of soup-can labels and Marilyn Monroe. Pop art represented an attempt to return to a more objective, universally acceptable form of art after the dominance in both the United States and Europe of the highly personal Abstract Expressionist movement. Its effects—including its decisive destruction of the boundary between “high” and “low” art—have continued to be powerfully felt throughout the visual arts to the present day.

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pop art

a movement in modern art that imitates the methods, styles, and themes of popular culture and mass media, such as comic strips, advertising, and science fiction
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