After World War II, a great period of transition followed in Europe and the United States. Major reconstruction was the order of the day across Europe, and slowly the population of these territories enjoyed increasing prosperity and abundance. It was the dawn of a new era, but it wasn’t until the 1960s that the emerging “consumer” society gave rise to a demand for goods that until then were simply unattainable.
British Pop Art can trace its roots back to the mid-1950s. A small independent group made up of notable artists at the time together with critics from the art world organized an exhibition which was held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1956. This exhibition focused on the topic of cheap consumer products and the role they played. in modern life. Although it might not have seemed like it then, the exhibition was a huge step forward in the art world and a big change from what had come before. Former critic Lawrence Alloway (1926-1992) hailed it as the birth of something new, and in 1958 he christened this distinctive style of art “Pop Art.”
Key figures in the British Pop Art scene that followed were Richard Hamilton (b. 1922), whose work depicted automobiles, pin-up models, and household appliances, among others. Peter Blake (b. 1932), on the other hand, concentrated on comic strips and pop singers, while magazine collector Eduardo Paolozzi (b. 1924) produced stunning collage prints by recycling and integrating old advertising material with comic strip images. .
As for the United States, during the 1950s the art world was dominated by “abstract expressionism.” It was not until the early 1960s that American art critics and artists began to embrace Pop Art and gave this new style of art its own inimitable American “take.” In 1962, an exhibition titled “New Realists” was held at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York. This was groundbreaking in America, not least because the exhibition featured works by artists such as Andy Warhol (1928-1987), Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997), Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929), Jim Dine (b. 1935), and James Rosenquist (b. 1933). Of these, Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Oldenburg became key figures in the world of pop art. Warhol became a household name.
Indeed, Warhol’s fame rose in 1962 after his work “Campbell’s Soup Cans” was produced and presented in separate works, first as individual “cans” and then the same cans lined up in immaculate rows. Arguably the biggest female icons of the ’60s at the time, Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy also received the “Warhol treatment” in which he silkscreened their images, altered colors, and rendered them in repeating patterns.
Roy Lichtenstein was very much a “comic strip” artist and produced a large number of works using comic book imagery. Beginning in 1960, he painted highly inflated images of comic strip frames formed from dots of colored newsprint. During the same year, Oldenburg dedicated himself to carving out his own niche in the world of pop art, creating large painted plaster sculptures of sandwiches and cakes! These were soon followed by huge plastic appliances that were smoothed down to allow them to give a distinctive ‘tumble’. It was all designed to explore the nature of “consumer culture” that spanned nations on both sides of the Atlantic.
With mass consumer commercialism increasing at an alarming rate (and seemingly no end in sight), “Pop Art” is still very much alive and perhaps even more poignant and thought-provoking today than it was in the mid-20th century.