Pop Art and Minimal Art

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Pop Art

Pop Art was a visual art movement that emerged in the 1950s in Britain and the United States. The origin of the term Pop Art is unknown but is often credited to British art critic Lawrence Alloway in an essay titled "The Arts and the Mass Media", although he uses the words "popular mass culture" instead of "pop art". Alloway was one of the leading critics to defend Pop Art as a legitimate art form.

It was one of the biggest art movements of the twentieth century and is characterized by themes and techniques drawn from popular mass culture, such as television, movies, advertising and comic books. Pop art is widely interpreted as either a reversal or reaction to Abstract Expressionism or an expansion upon it.

This movement sprung up as a result of a fascination with the popular culture and affluent post art society.

Pop Art celebrated simple every day objects such as soup cans, soap, washing powder, pop bottles, and comic strips.

It was directly influenced by Dadaism in that it pokes fun at the traditional art world by using images from the streets and supermarkets, and suggesting that they are art forms in themselves

Pop Art encompasses definitions of the popular, the expendable, the mass produced, the young, witty and sexy, and the glamorous.

When Warhol first exhibited these thirty–two canvases in 1962, each one simultaneously hung from the wall like a painting and rested on a shelf like groceries in a store. The number of canvases corresponds to the varieties of soup then sold by the Campbell Soup Company. Warhol assigned a different flavor to each painting, referring to a product list supplied by Campbell's. There is no evidence that Warhol envisioned the canvases in a particular sequence. Here, they are arranged in rows that reflect the chronological order in which they were introduced, beginning with "Tomato" in the upper left, which debuted in 1897.

Flag Jasper Johns

In creating “Flag,” his groundbreaking and best-known work, Jasper Johns used furniture paint, newspaper collage, and a wax encaustic technique used by ancient Egyptian painters to create images derived from real shapes and objects. Separating an object from its symbolic connotations, Johns uses strong, graphic shapes depicting popular icons such as flags, targets, letters, numbers and maps. Johns became a forerunner of the Minimal and Conceptual movements, as well as Pop Art, producing intaglio prints, sculptures and lithographs with similar motifs. 

 

Lichtenstein found sources for many of his early paintings in comic books. The source for this work is "Run for Love!" published by DC Comics in 1962. In the original illustration, the drowning girl's boyfriend appears in the background, clinging to a capsized boat. Lichtenstein cropped the image dramatically, showing the girl alone, encircled by a threatening wave. He shortened the caption from "I don't care if I have a cramp!" to the ambiguous "I don't care!" and changed the boyfriend's name she calls out from Mal to Brad. In addition to appropriating the melodramatic content of comics, Lichtenstein manually simulated the Benday dots used in the mechanical reproduction of images.

Tom Wesselmann (American, 1931-2004)

April 1963. Oil, enamel and synthetic polymer paint on composition board with collage of printed advertisements, plastic flowers, refrigerator door, plastic replicas of 7-Up bottles, glazed and framed color

reproduction, and stamped metal, 48 1/2 x 66 x 4" (122 x 167.5 x 10 cm).

MINIMAL art

Minimal Art emerged as a movement in the 1950s and continued through the Sixties and Seventies. It is a term used to describe paintings and sculpture that thrive on simplicity in both content and form, and seek to remove any sign of personal expressivity. The aim of Minimalism is to allow the viewer to experience the work more intensely without the distractions of composition, theme and so on.

From the 1920s artists such as Malevich and Duchamp produced works in the Minimalist vein but the movement is known chiefly by its American exponents such as Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Ellsworth Kelly and Donald Judd who reacted against Abstract Expressionism in their stark canvases, sculptures and installations.

It is based on creating objects of interest and beauty. Minimalists reduced their work to the smallest

number of colors, values, shapes, lines, and textures. Other names for the movement include ABC art,

minimal art, reductivism, and rejective art. Minimalist art was normally precise and hard-edged.

It incorporated geometric forms often in repetitive patterns and solid planes of color, normally cool hues or unmixed colors straight from the tube.

Often based on a grid and mathematically composed, the use of industrial materials was common in order to eliminate the evidence of the artist’s hand.

From left to right: 1. two columns, 2. mirrored cubes, 3. ring with light

Robert Rauschenberg,  Riding Bikes, Berlin, Germany, 1998. Untitled

(Stack)Donald Judd (American, 1928-1994)1967. Lacquer on galvanized iron, Twelve units, each 9 x 40 x 31" (22.8 x 101.6 x 78.7 cm), installed vertically with 9" (22.8 cm) intervals.

in Judd's stack of galvanized–iron boxes, all of the units are identical; they are set on the

wall and separated, so that none is subordinated to another's weight (and also

so that the space around them plays a role in the work equivalent to theirs); and their

regular climb—each of the twelve boxes is nine inches high, and they rest nine inches

apart—suggests an infinitely extensible series, denying the possibility of a crowning

summit.

"Monument" for V. Tatlin 1Dan Flavin (American, 1933-1996)1964. Fluorescent lights and metal fixtures, 8' x 23 1/8" x 4 1/2" (243.8 x 58.7 x 10.8 cm).

This is the first of thirty–nine "monuments" to the Russian artist Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953) that Flavin created between 1964 and 1990. The stepped arrangement of white fluorescent tubes evokes Tatlin’s colossal Monument to the Third International (1920), a soaring tower intended to support Lenin’s Plan for Monumental Propaganda. Tatlin's ambitious but unrealized project to unite art and technology was of particular interest to Flavin. Although the utopian goals of the Russian Constructivists were never fulfilled, their art and philosophy were of great interest to artists of the 1960s. 

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