Basic Knowledge on Pop Art Paintings
Pop art was an art movement that initially occurred in the
United States of America in the early sixties. The epicenter of
this art phenomenon was New York, the city confirming its trend
setting leader position. Although this movement strongly erupted
in the early sixties, the attempts of change started during the
late fifties in the work of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper
Johns. These painters wanted to replace the abstract mode of
artistic expression, aiming at making the art's message easier
to be understood by the public. The first pop art paintings
contained easy to recognize images of common items. The purpose
of incorporating these objects was to mock the gravity, the
metaphysical dullness of abstract expressionism that had started
to become out of fashion. Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg
introduced amusing objects into the first pop art paintings:
flags, maps and targets or stuffed animals and rubber tyres for
the latter artist. The pop art movement become famously known
for their main feature: mockery and irony.
Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist Andy Warhol and Roy
Lichtenstein were the most representative artists for this new
art stream. Their pop art paintings were characterized by their
original display of popular culture's symbols: advertisements,
media images or even comic strips. These new, colorful, lively
pop art paintings were strikingly opposing the gravity, the
spirituality of abstract expressionism. Consequently, these
kinds of pop art paintings become very popular among the art
loving public and among the art critics community. But the
abstract expressionism continued to be highly appreciated,
despite the pop art paintings' mockery.
Although the pop art movement was popular and influential it
proved to lack the strength of completely supplant the abstract
expressionism, but it determined the birth of two new schools of
abstraction: color-field painting and minimalist art. The
color-field painting movement (mainly represented by painter
Helen Frankenthaler) minimized the influence of abstract
expressionism's old features into a style completely committed
to the use of pure color.
The American art of the sixties remained in the art history
books as a period of constant rivalries between different
competing styles and ideas. Yet, the pop art paintings
represented best the ideas and the symbols of the American
lifestyle in the sixties.