Pop Art

and
Minimal Art

∞ SJTo™
 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
in Judd's stack of galvanized–iron boxes, all of the units units, each 9
are identical; they are set on the wall and separated, so x 40 x 31"
that none is subordinated to another's weight (and also (22.8 x 101.6 x
so that the space around them plays a role in the work 78.7 cm),
equivalent to theirs); and their regular climb—each of installed
the twelve boxes is nine inches high, and they rest nine vertically with
inches apart—suggests an infinitely extensible series, 9" (22.8 cm)
denying the possibility of a crowning summit. intervals.
"Monument" for V. Tatlin 1
Dan 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.
 
Merci.∞