POP ART — origins
Pop art from English popular art, abbreviated pop art — popular, accessible art; a second meaning of the word is linked to the onomatopoeic Eng. pop — a sharp blow, clap, slap, i.e. producing a shocking effect.
Pop art — a movement in art of the late 1950s and early 70s arises as opposition to non-objective abstractionism and marks the transition to the concept of a new avant-gardism.
Pop artists proclaimed as their goal a “return to reality,” but a reality already mediated by mass media. The source of their inspiration was glossy magazines, advertising, packaging, television, photography. Pop art brought the object back into art, but this was an object not of artistic vision, but a deliberately everyday object tied to contemporary industrial culture and, in particular, to contemporary forms of information: print, television, cinema.
The new technical devices of the pop-art style, borrowed from industrial design and advertising — photographic printing, the use of a slide projector, the inclusion of real objects, contributed both to the “depersonalization” of the artist’s individual creative manner and to the “revelation of the aesthetic value” of samples of mass production.
Pop art originally emerged in England, but American and French artists and designers achieved the greatest fame. Similar currents of the style soon appeared in Italy, Germany, and even in the USSR, which at that time was separated from the rest of the world by the “Iron Curtain.”
In 1952 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London several critics, artists and architects formed the “Independent Group,” which studied contemporary technologies and urban popular culture. Artists Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi began to study the “images” of mass art. Various research methods were applied to the phenomenon of “mass culture” — from linguistic to psychological.
The studies were conducted on the basis of American culture, toward which the group’s members felt mixed feelings of irony and admiration. Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi created collage compositions from the most popular subjects of the press and advertising for new industrial products. It was then that one of the group’s members, the critic Lawrence Alloway, proposed the term “pop art” to designate the new phenomenon in visual creation.
In 1956 in London the exhibition “This Is Tomorrow” was held, consisting of photographs of Hollywood movie stars and film stills enlarged to the size of a cinema screen. After the exhibition, graduates of the college of fine arts joined the group: Peter Blake, Ronald Kitaj, David Hockney and others.
From intellectual researchers the artists gradually turned into apologists of mass culture, preachers not only of a new aesthetic but also of a new way of life based on anarchic ideals of freedom, new principles of morality and rock music.
POP ART in America
Commodity fetishism and the ideology of equal opportunity in the USA lead to the fact that from the late 1950s pop art becomes widespread in American art. International fame for pop art in its American version was brought by such artists as Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist, Tom Wesselmann, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol.
These artists rehabilitate the world of beauty of the banal; through their works runs pride that American commerce invented such goods that are always good, cheap and equally accessible. Their art is, in a certain sense, a monument to such goods and to social equality, for by consuming a product we can identify ourselves with any other consumer of that product: “You can watch television and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the president drinks Coca-Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca-Cola, you too can drink Coca-Cola... All Coca-Cola bottles are the same and they are all good” — said A. Warhol, glorifying consumption and making consumption part of his art.
Warhol noted that pop art swapped the inner and the outer. Pop artists created images that any person walking down Broadway recognized in the same second — comics, picnic tables, men’s trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coca-Cola bottles — all those great things that the Abstract Expressionists tried with all their might not to notice at all.
Pop art used what already existed and, moreover, what had grown stale, become familiar — the ready-made: real tin cans, bottles, crates, flags, which were drawn into combinations or selections with other real objects, drawn or painterly elements, photographs, newspaper or magazine illustrations, film stills.
Rauschenberg and Warhol introduced objects of “mass culture” into the picture as a direct quotation — in the form of collage or photographic reproduction. Rauschenberg developed the genre of combine paintings, in which painting in the spirit of Abstract Expressionism was joined with real objects. In the early 60s Tom Wesselmann began working in the pop-art style, combining planar depiction with real surroundings.
Wesselmann, who started as a cartoonist, and Rosenquist, who in his youth painted street signs, imitated the compositional devices and painterly technique of billboards in the pop-art style. A borrowed “image” of mass culture was placed in a different context; scale and material were changed, the device or technical method was laid bare, informational noise was revealed, and in connection with this the original image was paradoxically transformed and ironically reinterpreted.
Interior in the POP ART style
A pop-art interior is rainbow-bright color combinations and the use of long-existing objects, materials and forms in a new capacity. The pop-art style appeared in art in the 60s and quickly showed itself in decoration, including interior design. Today printed patterns and comics on fabrics in the pop-art style are a very popular motif in interior decoration.
This is that slightly “madhouse” that intuitively comes to mind at the word pop art: acid colors, an abundance of plastic, neon lighting and gloss, gloss, gloss everywhere. The walls must necessarily be bright, and ideally — of different colors and even textures. Harmony in the classical sense is best forgotten at once.
Pop artists were inspired by ordinary objects produced in the millions. The world of mass media, advertising, comics — all this was of undoubted interest to them. In the works they used tin cans, magazine pages, electronics, photographs, tickets, etc. Objects were copied many times over, mounted into collages and assemblages.
Pop design was inseparably linked with the American dream of an utterly consumerist worldview, which in the early 60s took hold of the entire Western world. The idea of producing durable, solid goods was replaced by the slogan “used today — thrown away tomorrow.” This was a breakthrough in the philosophy of industrial production and design. A child’s chair of corrugated cardboard, a colored inflatable armchair of polyvinyl chloride became symbols of the spreading “culture of transience.” Pop design with its bright colors, bold forms, cheap goods became a style for the young. The most popular materials for designers of the pop-art style were various kinds of plastics; plastic attracted with its low price and variety of colors.
Pop art developed its own principles of form-making, opposite to functionalism, yet at the same time not contradicting it. Allen Jones created life-size semi-nude beauties that were at the same time pieces of furniture. Thereby he posed the question of the boundary between art and functional design.
Pop design, together with other currents of an anti-design orientation, opposed the modern movement — functionalism, modernism — which declared “less is more” and led to the radical design of the 70s.
The mass media contributed to the popularization of pop art. Many believe that it is still hard to give a precise definition of the essence of the pop-art style and to outline its boundaries, but no one doubts that pop art became a symbol of the recognition and approval of a new “popular culture.”
POP ART — the color scheme of the interior style
A good solution for the pop-art style in an interior can be a variant in which one of the walls remains light, two more — of contrasting bright colors, and the fourth is executed in Warhol’s signature technique of a repeatedly repeating small pattern. And all four are without regret decorated, depending on your imagination and devotion to one pop-art figure or another, with images of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, Mao Zedong, scenes from comics, and so on.
POP ART — furniture in the interior
Something else you will have to accept when decorating an interior in the pop-art style is a shortage of furniture. Of course, sofas and armchairs typical of the 60s, of rounded forms and bright colors, poufs and small tables are permissible, and even welcome. But wardrobes, generally speaking, should not be there — resign yourself to the thought that things will have to be stored in niches, on podiums or in built-in closets. Yes, frankly speaking, extra things will no longer take root in your house, and for clothing it is best to set aside a separate dressing room.
