What is pop art?

Pop art is a movement of art that emerged in the UK and the US during the mid to late 1950s. This art movement was dominated by young artists of the time who were kind of revolting against the traditional and dominant approaches to art and culture. Basically, the pop art movement challenged the traditional forms of fine art that once dominated the art world back then. Pop art came along with imagery from across the popular and mass culture including comic books, advertising, as well as ordinary cultural objects. One of the main aims of famous pop art is to use images of popular culture in art.

Symbolism in pop art

Pop art creates paintings or sculptors of mass culture objects as well as media stars thus removing any boundaries that were imagined to exist between high and low culture. Pop art therefore highlights the concept that there isn’t any hierarchy of culture. This means that art can borrow from any source.

Pop artists who made some of the best famous pop art pieces were perhaps the first people to recognize the fact that there isn’t any unmediated access to virtually anything. According to pop artists, everything is interconnected and this is evident in the pop art paintings they made and left behind.

Some critics believe that pop artists took advantage of the post-world war II media and manufacturing boom. For this, the critics claim that pop art choosing imagery they are gladly endorsing the capitalist market and even the goods circulating in it.

Most of the pop art pioneers had their careers begin in commercial art. Any Warhol is one pop artist who was very successful in magazine illustration. There is also Ed Ruscha who was an accomplished graphic designer and so was James Rosenquist who started off a billboard painter. Thanks to their strong background in commercial art, they found it easy to inculcate the visual vocabulary of mass culture and the techniques therein to strike a balance between high art and the popular culture.

Some of the 2 important artworks and pop art artists instrumental in pop art movement

I was a rich man’s plaything (1947)

This was created by the Scottish artist and sculptor Edurado Paolozzi who was a member of the post-world war II avant-garde. His pop art work collage “I was a rich man’s plaything” laid the foundation stone for the pop art movement that would later emerge. After his work gained prominence other emerging pop artists would come up strengthening the pop art movement that grew and become a force to reckon with.

Just what is it that makes homes so different, so appealing? (1956)

This is yet another instrumental pop artwork that greatly contributed to the development of the pop art movement. It was created by artist Richard Hamilton and in fact it is sometimes considered to be the very first work of pop art. It was created for exhibition of “This is Tomorrow” at the London’s Whitechapel Gallery in the year 1956.