Determining the Main Purpose of the Pop Art Movement in the UK and the US

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In this essay has been tried to gathering the principal purpose of pop art as one of the most important art movements in the 20th century.

The pop art movement has been begun in the United Kingdom and the United States while the 1950s. The movement represented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular and mass cultures, such as a comic book, advertising, and regular cultural objects.

One of the missions was to use images of popular (as faced to elitist) culture in art, highlighting the common or kitschy elements of any culture, most often through the use of irony. It is also connected with the artists' use of mechanical means of rendering or reproduction techniques. In pop art, the material is sometimes visually separated from its known isolated, context, or combined with separate material.

Pop art has named from the British art critic Lawrence Alloway in the 1950s. The Pop Art name presented on the familiar imagery of the contemporary urban environment (Kleiner, 981). This art is famous for its bold and simple looks plus the bright colors.

The Pop art movement also became identified in the mid-1950 and continued as the main sort of art form until the late of 1960. Pop art was a movement where average played a large part in society, with it showing on advertisements, comic strips, and even stars, like Marilyn Monroe.

British pop art came in London in the late 1950s, with a group of sculptors, painters and other artists who join together to form the Independent Group.

The purpose of this group was to challenge current artistic convention and focus on a found art style that used cultural objects just as they were and did not try to stylize them through any specific lens. These artists received their inspiration from the sight of mass media, such as comic books, commercial advertisements, movies, magazines, and stars.

There was a difference between British pop art and the later American pop art which would appear from New York. For one, the British artists observed the American commercialism that they were parodying within a completely different view since they were not surrounded by it regularly in the same way as Americans were.

Some of the most influential painters of this movement were Eduardo Paolozzi, a sculptor and visual artists, artist Richard Hamilton and, surrealist artist Toni del Renzio. These artists were members of the Independent Group and met regularly at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London during the early 1950s. Paolozzi is often credited with producing the first work of real pop art, ‘I Was a Rich Man's Plaything’ collage in 1947; though one of the first widely viewed examples of this movement is Richard Hamilton's 'Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes so Different, so Appealing?', which was shown in the exhibition 'This Is Tomorrow' in London for the first time. Some of the London-based artists, such as Billy Apple (who was from New Zealand) would finally travel overseas and become settled in the American pop art movement as well, where they would meet and cooperate with the likes of Andy Warhol.

That could be said the British pop art arose from the Dada movement, an artistic movement from Europe, and it had other authority in the fine art, which made British pop art uniquely culturally British compared to the American counterpart. Though American mass media was veritably a considerable influence, the art that came about in London was very obviously the result of observing this commercialism through a British lens.

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The term of pop art itself was not used by any artist until the mid-1950s, though it became a general way to refer to this artistic movement after critic Lawrence Alloway wrote an essay explaining it in 1958. Although, the movement eventually grew up in Britain and ended in the United States, where it carries on in some form or another to this day.

Apart from this American pop art came around a few years after the British counterpart, appearing in the later 1950s through the work of artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

The pop art movement was a reflex to the commercialism which was particularly common in the post-World War II period, as many appearances of the mass media and worldwide pop cultures. Though it has its origins in the 1950s, American pop art was not called pop art until this time. Early exhibitions of American pop art be accomplished in the late 1950s in New York, while Andy Warhol, in specific, he sold his famous soup can paintings in his first exhibition in Los Angeles.

One of the critical differences between American pop art and British pop art was that British pop art focused on a more joyous tone and usually tended to combine humor; American pop art, was a product of the consecutive marketing that Americans managed to be subjected to, even artistic mass media, tone tended and the subject matter, became too severe and dramatic. The moderately less commercialized culture of Britain at the time allowed their pop art to take on more of a tone of parody.

Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselmann were some of the most notable painters during the rise of pop art in the United States.

Roy Lichtenstein was known as a founder of the movement in the U.S., and his work borrowed the art from comic books of America. As an artist, he was so respectable at the time that Andy Warhol changed away from comic books onto other subject matter in response to Lichtenstein's excellent representations of comic art. Andy Warhol himself rose to legendary status as well, both during his own time and in later generations, his work resonates with a vast audience. His pop art paintings remain some of the most precious to ever be sold, his ‘Campbell's Soup Cans’ being particularly valuable; some examples of his art are worth millions of dollars today.

Warhol was a commercial artist in New York City. In the early 1960s, he became the most famous pioneer of the pop art movement. Warhol's boxes of Brillo pads, colorful paintings of Campbell's soup can label, and celebrity icons such as Marilyn Monroe became between the most identifiable examples of pop art. Warhol was also a filmmaker and graphic artist as well as a painter; his more significant films include ‘Trash’ (1969) and ‘Frankenstein’ (1973). His studio, called ‘The Factory’ became notorious as a locale for oddballs and unusual behavior, much of it connected with the drug scene of New York. It was Warhol who predicted that “in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes”.

American pop art mired in advertising and commercialism which was a response to the culture at the time. Though pop art doesn't tend to criticize this state of affairs simply, it is heavily influenced by it, and in the same way that artists of the past influenced by nature and religion, modern pop artists were affected by the subjects that they were regularly exposed to—at the time, this was most often mass media. As a result, pop art resonated very profoundly with the mass population, as, unlike many avant-garde movements before, it incorporated subject matter and techniques that a wide audience was already very familiar.

Pop art generally was a movement who was connecting art with popular culture. Comic books, billboard signs, and movie stars were just some of the subjects preferred by artists, such as Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, and James Rosenquist, few of illustrating the contemporary world in which they lived. Mostly specified by bold and strident colors composed with a cool-eyed attribution of contemporary imagery, pop art attempted to highlight both the negative and positive facets of modern culture.

The newest part in the Art Essentials series examines this phenomenon, which had its roots in post-world war British and American consumerism before capturing and spreading the creativity of young artists.

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Determining the Main Purpose of the Pop Art Movement in the UK and the US. (2022, September 01). Edubirdie. Retrieved April 27, 2024, from https://edubirdie.com/examples/determining-the-main-purpose-of-the-pop-art-movement-in-the-uk-and-the-us/
“Determining the Main Purpose of the Pop Art Movement in the UK and the US.” Edubirdie, 01 Sept. 2022, edubirdie.com/examples/determining-the-main-purpose-of-the-pop-art-movement-in-the-uk-and-the-us/
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Determining the Main Purpose of the Pop Art Movement in the UK and the US [Internet]. Edubirdie. 2022 Sept 01 [cited 2024 Apr 27]. Available from: https://edubirdie.com/examples/determining-the-main-purpose-of-the-pop-art-movement-in-the-uk-and-the-us/
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