Pop Art In the decade after the mid-1950s, a new art genre called "Pop Art" developed in the United States and Britain. These people who were dubbed "Pop Artists" all had a unique characteristic in their creations during this period. They used popular commercial cultural images and everyday objects in urban life as their themes and adopted creative techniques. It also often reflects the characteristics of the times of industrialization and commercialization. The elements that created Pop Art were not found everywhere. The postwar British and American urban culture was the special soil for its growth. Only artists who are in close contact with this urban culture can grasp the unique style and expression techniques of Pop Art.

People think that Pop Art in a narrow sense originated in Britain, not the United States. In late 1952, a group of young painters, sculptors, architects and critics met at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. This self-proclaimed "independent group" focused on discussing popular culture and its meaning, such as Western movies, space novels, billboards, machine beauty, etc. These phenomena were all considered anti-aesthetics at the time. The group was fascinated by the new urban pop culture, and was particularly attracted to American expressions. On the one hand, in the eyes of the British, the United States at that time was an ideal country with everything from nylon products to new motorcycles. On the other hand, the British art world in the 1940s was enveloped in an atmosphere of serious romanticism, and British Pop Art was a reaction to it.

In 1956, the "Independents" held an exhibition entitled "This is Tomorrow". The most affecting work in the exhibition and the most influential work on art history is a poster placed in the entrance area by Richard Hamilton, titled "What is it about today's homes that makes them so extraordinary and charming?" ‖ (Figure 1). The painting shows a modern apartment with a muscular man and an arrogant naked woman cut out from illustrated magazines. The apartment contains a wealth of cultural artifacts: a television, a tape recorder, an enlarged comic book cover, a Ford badge and an advertisement for a vacuum cleaner. A movie screen can be seen through the window in the painting, showing a close-up of Al Jolson from the movie "The Jazz Singer." The man was also holding an extremely large lollipop with three large letters POP on it. The word Pop Art comes from this. POP is not only the suffix of the English word lollipop, but also the abbreviation of the word "popular".

In the United States, Pop Art was a reaction against the dominant Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s. On the one hand, abstract expressionist works are seen as a display of the artist's unique personality. It is completely personal, subjective and spiritual. It emphasizes the purity of art and becomes a kind of spiritual aristocratic art. On the other hand, because this kind of spirituality lies in improvisation and is completely personal, many latecomers have imitated it, so it seems that everyone can do this "elegant" art. It's a pity that most of these works only have dazzling images, and it is difficult to show the spirit. It can be said that "it seems much, but in fact it is less". Pop Art addressed the issues of Abstract Expressionism and boldly tried new materials, new themes, and new forms. In the 1960s, Pop Art vigorously brought "life" and modern urban life into museums and galleries. The first collective exhibition that popularized the term "Pop" was the "New Realist Artists" exhibition held at Sydney Janis Gallery in 1962, which brought together artists of this trend (including European artist). This was followed by two exhibitions in 1963: the "Six Painters Exhibition" and the "Popular Image Exhibition".

To some extent, the United States has indeed influenced all pop art in the world. Due to the powerful power of American commercial culture, you can watch Hollywood movies and eat McDonald's hamburgers in almost any country in the world. It has penetrated into many cultures and has become consumable popular culture. From another perspective, Pop Art is also "industrial" art.

Roy Lichtenstein once said: "Because the United States has been hit harder and faster by industrialization and capitalism, its values ????seem to be more distorted... I think the meaning of my creation is to show that it is industrial Sexual, this is also the direction of the whole world. Europe will soon be like this, so Pop Art will not be American, it will be global. "

Pop Art resisted a famous critic. Family motto: Great art must be difficult art. Pop artists often use collage or mass copying techniques, which seem easier. "Pop Art is instant coffee, the wide screen in modern movies. It is not Latin under the rule of monks. It is popular art." The appeal of Pop Art is as broad as its scope. It accepts everything and accepts everything. All the more ordinary aspects of life. It's still art, but it's not art for art's sake.

When it comes to British and American Pop Art, the first thing to mention is the Americans Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, and the British Richard Hamilton. . Rauschenberg was born in Texas in 1925 and studied at the Collège Julesin in Paris in the late 1940s. He was influenced by abstract expressionism in his early days. In the early 1950s, he painted a series of all-white paintings, in which the only image was the shadow of the viewer. Later he painted a series of all-black paintings, but these were not his first paintings. Later, he developed in the direction of "assembly painting", using common objects in life to compose pictures - beer bottles, waste paper boxes, old tires, newspapers, photos, ropes, sacks, pillows, etc. The canvas and the objects fixed on the canvas make up the work. "Bed" (Figure 2) is a typical work of this type. The author simply hung sleeping bags and pillows on the canvas and then poured some paint on them. His purpose of using readymades in his works is to break the boundaries between art and life. As he said: "Painting is art and life, neither of which is made. What I want to do is somewhere in between." At the same time, his works have traces of abstract expressionism, and are often magnificent. of courage.

Rauschenberg's artistic philosophy was influenced by the experimental artist John Cage, whom he met while working at Black Mountain College. He met Cage in 1951, and the two had a close relationship. Cage influenced Rauschenberg from a Zen perspective: "Judgment is meaningless, because there is no fact that one thing is better than another, and art should not be different from life, but an act in life."

During his creative career, Rauschenberg has always maintained contact with the surrounding urban and technological society. His "integrated" approach can best reflect the rich images of an era. , for example, in "Symbols" (Figure 3), we can see all the information that has the characteristics of the United States in the 1960s, including star President Kennedy, black leader Martin Luther King, Vietnam War soldiers, moon landing astronauts, and the pursuit of sexual liberation of hippies and so on.

Johns' career had many similarities with Rauschenberg's, and the two shared a studio at a critical moment in their development. Johns is famous for using single and ordinary images, such as a row of numbers (Figure 4-1), a target (Figure 4-2), an American flag (Figure 5), a map of the United States, etc., which have become classics of Pop Art. do. He chose such images because he believed they would no longer produce any energy. What he wants to emphasize is that "painting is itself, not a representation of any other object."

Johns does not intend to express criticism of art or society through his works. In his opinion, what an artist wants to do is his absolute freedom and should not be restricted by considerations of evaluation. He believes that in most cases, the work will be misunderstood and misused, and the artist has no control over the situation and the way his work is evaluated, and he has no problem with this interesting situation. One of his famous sculptures is a replica of two beer cans made of iron (Figure 6), which is often understood as a criticism of a certain status quo of society. But in fact this creation was purely accidental.

"I was making sculptures out of small objects - flashlights and light bulbs. And then there's this story that Willem de Kooning got annoyed by my agent for some reason, and he said, 'That bitch, you give him Two beer cans, he could sell them too. 'I heard that and thought: 'What a nice sculpture - two beer cans. ' It seemed to suit my taste at the time, so I did it - -Then my agent sold them. "

In the British Pop Art movement, the artist comparable to Rauschenberg and Johns in the United States was Richard Hamilton. The three men were more similar in their keen interest in Dadaism. Hamilton's personal upbringing had an important influence on his artistic endeavors. Compared to most other artists, he was actually an autodidact. He started working in advertising after graduating from primary school at the age of 14, while attending night classes at several art schools. His experience as a teacher became another powerful influence on his painting career. He taught design courses for a long time, which made him pay special attention to problem-solving skills, and also made him often a pragmatist. In 1957, he said that the qualities he pursued were popular, ephemeral, affordable, funny, sexy, gimmicky, charming, and cheap and mass-produced.

While Hamilton made extensive use of American themes, he was not an American artist. He was always willing to explain his work, sometimes in great detail. For example, the work "She" is a collection of many advertising images: photos of Shengjiao refrigerators, advertisements for vacuum cleaners and other electrical appliances, and pictures of Esquire magazine pinned to the wall. Hamilton included a long description of this work: "Women in 1950s art were anachronistic - she reminded us of the smell of sewers, morbidly fat, pink-cross-legged, silly and lustful. It is nothing like the image of a cold woman in art works. That kind of woman is indeed lustful, and she is especially clever when expressing her sexual desire. Even though she is equipped with the most expensive jewelry, people still regard her as just a fashionable accessory. From an advertising point of view, the worst thing about a woman is that she cannot elegantly harmonize with her environment - the harmony between a woman and her environment, just like the harmony between herself and her clothes, can determine our view of her. Reviews. Sex is everywhere, and its symbols can be found in mass-produced glamorous luxury products - fleshy plastics and smooth, more fleshy metals. "

Create later. "I Dream of a White Christmas" takes a cinematic shot and creates a series of elaborate transformations. What's special is that Hamilton used color negatives instead of color positives, and replaced the white singer in the film with a black singer, ironically alluding to the title of the song sung by the singer. This element of satire doesn’t exclude nostalgia, though. Hamilton's works, like those of other British Pop artists, have a touch of sadness, which makes his works more charming than those of American Pop artists.