Origins and Characteristics of Pop Art
members) and to persuade them to
Pop Art
 an avant-garde modern art movement
in the mid-twentieth century that
emerged in the United States and
Britain.
 Pop artists borrowed and appropriated
images from mass media and popular
culture, including Hollywood films,
newspaper advertisements, comic
books, and cartoons.
 Pop artists saw the established
hierarchies of art and culture as
detached from the environment they
were experiencing in their day-to-day.
They appropriated images from their
immediate environment in order to blur
the boundaries between high art and
low art.
Popular culture
 Popular culture, or pop culture,
(literally: "the culture of the people")
consists of the cultural elements that
prevail (at least numerically) in any
given society, mainly using the more
popular media, in that
society's vernacular language and/or an
established lingua franca.
 It results from the daily interactions,
needs and desires and cultural 'moments'
that make up the everyday lives of
the mainstream. It can include any
number of practices, including those
pertaining to cooking, clothing, mass
media and the many facets
of entertainment such
as sports and literature.
(Compare meme.) Popular culture often
contrasts with a more exclusive,
even elitist " high culture".
 If one regards culture as a way of
defining oneself (an extremely
individualist approach), a culture needs
to attract the interest of people (potential
invest a part of themselves in it. People
like to feel a part of a group and to
understand their cultural identity within
that group, which tends to happen
naturally in a small, somewhat isolated
community. Mass culture, however, lets
people define themselves in relation to
everybody else in mass society at the
level of a city, a country, an
international community (such as a
wide-spread language, a former colonial
empire, a religion) or even of a whole
planet.
 Pop culture finds its expression in the
mass circulation of items from areas
such as fashion, music, sport and film.
The world of pop culture had a
particular influence on art from the early
1960s, through Pop Art.
Origins of the Pop Art Movement
Pop art grew out of the popular and material
culture of the late 1950s and 1960s, but the origins
trace back to turn-of-the-twentieth-century
contemporary art movements. Here is an overview
of the origins of Pop Art.
1. Conceptual roots in Dadaism:
 A guiding principle of Dadaism—an art
movement in the early twentieth century
driven by humor and absurdity—is that
anything can be art, which influenced
the pop artists. Marcel
Duchamp’s readymade sculptures—
which were mass-produced found
objects staged in galleries—were first
showcased in the 1910s, and set a
precedent for the artist determining what
art can be.
 Different Modes of Dadaism:
 As Duchamp's readymade exemplify, the
Dadaists did not shy away from
experimenting with new media.
 For example, Jean Arp-a sculptor who
pioneered dadaism explored the art of
collage and the potential for randomness
in its creation.
 Man Ray also toyed with the arts of
photography and airbrushing as practices
that distanced the hand of the artist and
thus incorporated collaboration with a
chance.
Marcel Duchamp: The Forefather of
Conceptual Art
• Marcel Duchamp is regarded as one of
the crucial figures in the development of
modern and contemporary art and his
body of work spanning from painting to
the plastic arts has had a huge impact
persisting to this day.
• The artist-provocateur par excellence,
not only did he provide a personal
interpretation of Cubism, but also greatly
influenced Dadaism and Surrealism,
paving the way for Conceptual Art with
the aim of putting "art back in the service
of the mind."
 Duchamp and the early 20th-century
avant-garde Duchamp made
memorable contributions to avant-
garde movements such as Cubism and
Dadaism and had an impact on
Surrealism.
Cubism
 Although Marcel Duchamp's
contribution to Cubism was
short-lived, his Nude
Descending a Staircase was an
important Cubist work that made
waves at the 1913 New York
Armory Show.
 This was the show where Man
Rav encountered Duchamp's
work, starting a lifelong
friendship between the two
artists.
Dadaism
 Duchamp naturally connected to Dada
due to his great sense of humor and his
anti-establishment and anti-art
tendencies, and shared this with his
close friend, the artist Francis Picabia:
both were occupied with keeping a
"corridor of huinor” open through the
density of art theory.
 His studio was known for its spartan
interior with little more than a table and
chess set (all his life, Duchamp was an
avid chess player) and a chair.
 It is in this period, around 1913, that
the first readymade objects began
entering Duchamp's studio.
Examples of Famous Dada Art:
Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (1917)
Marcel Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel
(1913)
Man Ray's Ingres's Violin (1924)
Hugo Ball's Sound Poem Karawane
(1916)
Raoul Hausmann's Mechanical Head
(The Spirit of our Time) (1920)
Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (1917)
 In 1917, Marcel Duchamp submitted a
urinal to the Society of Independent
Artists.
 The Society refused Fountain because
they believed it could not be considered
a work of art.
  Duchamp's Fountain raised countless
important questions about what makes
art art and is considered a major
landmark in 20th-century art.
Marcel Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel (1913)
 "In 1913, I had the happy idea to fasten a
bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watch
it turn,” said Marcel Duchamp about his
famous work Bicycle Wheel.
 Bicycle Wheel is the first of Duchamp's
readymade objects.
 Ready-mades were individual objects that
Duchamp repositioned or signed and called
art. He called Bicycle Wheel an "assisted
readymade," made by combining more
than one utilitarian item to form a work of
art.
Man Ray's Ingres's Violin (1924)
 By painting f holes of a stringed
instrument onto the photographic print of
his nude model Kiki de Montparnasse and
rephotographing the print, Man Ray
altered what was originally a classical
nude.
 The female body was now transformed
into a musical instrument. He also added
the title Le Violin d'Ingres, a French
idiom that means "hobby."
Hugo Ball's Sound Poem Karawane
(1916).
 Founder of the Cabaret Voltaire and writer
of the first Dadaist Manifesto in 1916,
most of Ball's work was in the genre of
sound poetry.
 In 1916, the same year in which the
published the first Dadaist Manifesto, Ball
performed the sound poem Karawane.
 Though the poem could be confused with
random, mad ramblings, sound poetry was
really a deeply considered method in the
experimental literature.
 The idea was to bring the sounds of human
vocalization to the foreground by removing
everything else.
Raoul Hausmann's Mechanical Head (The
Spirit of our Time) (1920)
 Raoul Hausmann was a poet, collagist,
and performance artist, who is best known
for his sculpture entitled Mechanical Head
(The Spirit of Our Time).
 The manikin head made from a solid
wooden block is a reversal of Hegel's
assertion that "everything is mind.”
 For Hausmann, man is empty-headed
"with no more capabilities than that which
chance has glued to the outside of his
skull."
 By raising these topics, Hausmann wanted
to compose an image that would shatter
the mainstream Western conventions that
the head is the seat of reason.
2. Critiques of society:
 Following in the footsteps of the abstract
expressionists of the early 1940s—who
emphasized subconscious, automatic
creation—Pop art reintroduced
recognizable images into fine art, which
was a dramatic shift in modern art. The
British pop art group the “Independent
Group” emerged in the 1940s in London,
England. These artists critiqued British
society with collages using images of
American popular culture they found in
popular magazines.
3. American prosperity:
 Following World War II, the United
States experienced a period of
tremendous economic growth and
prosperity, which resulted in an
explosion of popular culture and
material culture were being mass-
produced for the general populace.
American artists and artists in Britain
 used this newly democratized landscape
as inspiration.
4. The first use of the term “Pop Art”:
 The term ‘pop art’ was coined by the
British art critic Lawrence Alloway to
describe Richard Hamilton’s famous
1956 collage Just what is it that makes
today’s home so different, so appealing?
which is often cited as the first work of
Pop Art.
3 Characteristics of Pop Art
1. Appropriating images from mass media:
The most recognizable aspect of Pop Art is
the incorporation of recognizable images
from American pop culture. For example,
Andy Warhol used images of celebrities, like
Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor, and
sourced images from film publicity
advertisements and tabloid magazines.
2. Elevating the ordinary: Pop Art elevates
everyday images—like soup cans—to the
status of fine art. Artists would incorporate
objects or images from contemporary life
during the 1950s and 1960s into their fine
art, prioritizing the ubiquitous, banal, and
kitschy.
3. Repetition: Pop artists often reproduced the
same image multiple times in a single work
of art. This serialization of a single subject
was both a celebration and critique of mass
production and marketing in contemporary
culture. Artists like Andy Warhol used
screen printing—a technology utilized in
mass production—to create his works of art,
while others like Roy Lichtenstein
meticulously painted Ben-Day dots to
imitate the appearance of images in printed
comic strips.
5 Famous Pop Art Artists
Here are some of the most recognizable names
from the Pop Art movement.
1. Andy Warhol: Andy Warhol became one of
the most recognizable names of the Pop Art
movement for his colorful, pop culture-
influenced art along with his enigmatic
art persona. In addition to his “Factory”—a
New York City-based hub for artists,
socialites, and muses to collaborate—Warhol
is famous for his images of celebrities, such
as Gold Marilyn Monroe and Campbell’s
Soup Cans.
2. Roy Lichtenstein: Lichtenstein is famous
for his cartoon and comic book-inspired
paintings using Ben-Day dots, a method of
printing images in pulp comic books, to
create his images as seen in Girl with a Ball.
3. James Rosenquist: Often working at a large
scale, Pop Art painter James Rosenquist
painted political and cultural figures as well
as images from popular culture, as seen in
his 1960 painting President Elect, showing
an image of President Kennedy’s face from
his campaign poster, next to a half a
Chevrolet and a slice of stale cake, which
was one of his campaign promises.
4. Claes Oldenburg: One of the leading
sculptors during the Pop Art movement,
Claes Oldenburg is known for creating giant
sculptures of lipsticks, clothespins,
shuttlecocks, and slices of cake.
5. Ed Ruscha: Painter Ed Ruscha is famous for
his word paintings—which focused on
typography instead of images—and often
painted with unconventional media, like
blood, red wine, juice, and gunpowder. In his
silkscreen Fruit Metrecal Hollywood,
Ruscha rendered an image of the Hollywood
sign on a piece of paper using apricot jam
and the diet drink Metrecal.
Criticisms of Popular Culture
Given its wide availability, popular culture has
attracted much criticism.
Some charge that popular culture tends
to endorse a limited understanding and
experience of life through common,
unsophisticated feelings and attitudes and its
emphasis on the banal, the superficial, the
capricious and the disposable. Critics may also
claim that popular culture stems more
from sensationalism and narcissistic wish-
fulfillment fantasies than from soberly
considered reality and mature personal and
spiritual development. Cultural items that
require extensive experience, education,
training, taste, insight or reflection for their
fuller appreciation seldom become items of
popular culture.
Corporations and advertisers have acquired a
reputation for pushing popular memes in order
to generate the mass consumption of their
products and services. Some Marxists complain
that popular culture — and its implied insistence
on a necessary causal relationship between
consumption and self-actualization —
perpetuates pernicious, deep-seated social and
economic divisions which alienate the working
class from the ruling professional and leisure
classes and result in general discontent and a
diminished quality and enjoyment of life for all
(compare situationism).