Pop Art



Pop Art
Pop Art is art in which commonplace objects and images such as cars, soup cans, electrical appliances, cartoon strips, are used as subject matter for artistic composition. Popularized by such, now infamous, artists as Roy LichtensteinAndy Warhol and Claus Oldenburg, pop art was an artistic and cultural movement in America and Britain in the late 1950's and 60's. Though easily and frequently disregarded (both contemporary and historically) as anti-aesthetic, overly commercial, sensationalized and even vulgar, pop art was a powerful provocateur to historical artistic movements and instructive for the future in its vision of art.  


When you here Pop Art; think art about popular culture.

Pop Artists













Once you “got” Pop, you could never see a sign the same way again.  And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again.       

-Andy Warhol

Roy Lichtenstein
Historical Perspective 
Pop art is decidedly rooted in the tradition of Realism, an aesthetic which revoked an idealization of subject matter in favor of subject matter drawn from the commonplace, the everyday. In the words of Gustave Courbet, a champion  of the Realistic perspective, "for an artist the practice of art should involve bringing to bear his faculties on the ideas and objects of the period in which he lives"(Britt). And indeed the focus for the Pop Artists is on the objects at hand, the images of the mass media--t.v., cinema, picture magazines, billboards etc. Hamburgers, SpaghettiosCoca-Cola are prolific images in the art of the era. 


Wayne Thiebaud

 Claes Oldenberg







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