Urban Animals - Art Gallery of Alberta

The Alberta Foundation for the Arts Travelling Exhibition Program
Pop Art: A Brief Analysis
Pop Art refers to an art movement that
began in the mid 1950s in Britain and
in the late 1950s in the United States.
From the very start its imagery was
largely based on American mass media
and the movement thus had a special
appeal to American artists. The Pop Art
Movement reached its fullest
development in America in the 1960s.
Pop Art challenged tradition by asserting
that an artist’s use of the mass-produced
visual commodities of popular culture is
contiguous with the perspective of Fine
Art. Pop Art is aimed to employ images
of popular as opposed to elitist culture in
art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy
elements of any given culture. As such,
pop art employs aspects of mass culture
such as advertising, comic books, and
mundane cultural objects as art subjects
such as hamburgers and ice-cream
cones. Pop Art is also associated with the
artists’ use of mechanical means of
reproduction or rendering techniques
such as the commercial advertising
technique of silk-screening.
Jasper Johns
Flag, 1954-1955
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Patrick Caulfield
Still Life with Dagger, 1963
Tate Gallery, London U.K.
In the United States Pop Art was initially regarded as
a reaction to Abstract Expressionism because its
exponents brought back figural, representational
imagery and made use of hard-edged, quasiphotographic
techniques. Early Pop artists, such as
Jasper Johns, used the energetic brushstrokes and
boldly abbreviated shapes of Action Painting, but Pop
artists differed in that their paintings are about
something beyond personal symbolism and
‘painterly looseness’.
Pop artists were often labeled Neo-Dadaists because
they used commonplace subjects such as comic strips
(Roy Lichtenstein), soup tins (Andy Warhol) and
highway signs which had affinities with Marcel Duchamp’s ‘ready-mades’ of the early 20th
century.
Artists associated with the Pop Art Movement are not unified in their artistic approaches but,
AFA Travelling Exhibition Program, Edmonton, AB. Ph: 780.428.3830 Fax: 780.421.0479
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