Some of the pop art phenomenon’s best-known artists, such as Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg, were born in the 1920s, which was a boom time in the US With money to spare and jazz music starting to leave its mark. fingerprint. But in 1929 the stock market crashed and the United States entered a depression that lasted until the mid-1930s. Perhaps the most famous of all pop artists, Andy Warhol, was born at the beginning of that depression.
So these artists grew up in a rapidly changing world that went from boom to boom until WWII in just over 10 years. When the war ended, they were still young, and during the 1950s people again had some extra money available to spend on the endless stream of new products that were beginning to appear.
And it was the design and advertising of these new products that artists commented on and influenced in a way that no previous generation of artists had. They tried to use ordinary consumer items in their work to encourage people to see them differently. They also placed common items in unusual ways for people to notice.
Other common themes in pop art were comics and famous people of that time such as Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe, who will be forever associated with Warhol’s work. Warhol used screen printing techniques for his work and usually made multiple copies of the same image.
But what the artists sought to highlight was the way famous people were treated as objects in the same way as products in advertising, without any sense of their individuality. Although many pop artists were unwilling to make sense of their work, and even those who asked questions with their art, they left those same questions unanswered. Jasper Johns, famous for his series of paintings showing the American flag, questioned whether his own work was art or just a flag.
So what are the characteristics of Pop Art?
Just as the world we live in is infinitely varied, Pop Art used a variety of techniques, but the common characteristics that define works as Pop Art are as follows:
Graphic style: Clearly defined shapes and colors with hard edges, such as the styles of Lichtenstein’s comics and the works of David Hockney.
Fun and happy: Rejecting the rather serious approach of previous artists.
Everyday products and brands: including food products, automobiles, and advertising images and films.
Collage: and also different techniques within a work.
No perspective: Two-dimensional flat jobs are very common.
Mechanical techniques– Screen printing was used to create different versions of the same image.