Pop Art

Until the early 1960s, the artefacts of our so-called mass culture were never taken seriously by social and cultural critics. More often than not, these artefacts were either routinely ignored or simply dismissed as an example of the mindless fluff churned out to please the somewhat limited intelligence of the Great Unwashed.

The first examples of Pop Art were not very well-received by many critics. Some dismissed it as a fad or a joke; others considered it an affront to serious art.

But people were buying Pop; some critics reversed their earlier opinions, and the first large-scale exhibition of Pop Art was held at New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 1963, featuring works by Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

By 1964, nearly every New York art gallery worth its East Side address was snapping, crackling, and popping with this new art form.

Astonishment reigned at paintings of Campbell’s Soup cans and of dollar bills, very realistically rendered by the silk-screen process, and of large blow-ups of frames from comic strip cartoons, including even their “thought balloons” – The former by Andy Warhol, the latter by Roy Lichtenstein.

Collectors and the public alike quickly became fascinated with Pop Art’s representation of everyday objects, including advertisements, commercial packaging, electrical appliances, and comic strips.

Artists like Warhol (himself a former commercial artist), John, Tom Wesselmann and Lichtenstein all simultaneously celebrated and sent up the all-pervasive culture of consumerism, blurring the distinction between commercial art and ‘high’ art.

Claes Oldenburg’s works used ‘bigness’ as a theme. His Pop sculptures of outsize hamburgers, French fries, typewriters, vacuum cleaners, and other articles of contemporary Americana were larger than life – so large in fact, that they overwhelmed and dwarfed the onlooker.

Other Pop artists were on the scene at the time, notably Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Indiana, and Jim Dine, to name a few.