Pop Art
This movement was marked by a fascination with popular culture reflecting the affluence in post-war society. It was most prominent in American art but soon spread to Britain. In celebrating everyday objects such as soup cans, washing powder, comic strips and soda pop bottles, the movement turned the commonplace into icons. Pop Art is a direct descendant of Dadaism in the way it mocks the established art world by appropriating images from the street, the supermarket, the mass media, and presents it as art in itself.
Peter Max and Andy Warhol
One iconic artist of Art Pop is Peter Max. One of the most famous of all living artist’s, Peter Max is also a pop culture icon. His bold colors, uplifting images and an uncommon artistic diversity have touched almost every phase of American culture and has inspired many generations. Peter Max has painted for six U.S. Presidents and his art is on display in Presidential Libraries and in U.S. Embassies. Max has painted our Lady Liberty annually since America’s Bicentennial and in 2000 a collage of his Liberties adorned over 145 million Verizon phone books.
Another iconic artist of Art Pop is Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol became a household name appearing on television, mingling with the rich and famous as well as becoming a lightning rod for the underground. Between making films, writing and performing he was first and foremost an artist, the paintbrush being just one of the tools with which he captured and changed American culture. While Pop artists and their immediate forebears (Rauschenberg, Rivers, Johns) introduced novel popular subject matter into fine arts, it was the rightness of Warhol’s images (a combination of his silkscreen’s photographic literalness and the oracular power of his subjects) that helped put an end to the virtual dominance of American abstract painting and posited an entirely new set of possibilities. Ultimately, Warhol’s importance as an artist has to do with his particular insight into choice of subject and choice of technique. His work presents images of products of twentieth century mass-culture. He appropriated images generated by commercial methods of reproduction and technique allowing Warhol to create art that retroactively made his appropriated images globally Known. His art has become etched in our own experience of pop culture.
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