Pop Art - Origin of the term "pop art", Pop art in Britain, Pop art in America

A modern art form based on the commonplace and ephemeral aspects of 20th-c urban life, such as soup cans, comics, movies, and advertising. Pioneer British Pop artists included Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton in the mid-1950s, and leading US contributors in the 1960s include Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Roy Lichtenstein. American Pop is tougher and more deliberately shocking than British, with strong reminiscences of Dada. Humour is an important element, though art critics have been inclined to take it all very solemnly.

Pop art is one of the major art movements of the Twentieth Century. Pop art, like pop music, aimed to employ images of popular as opposed to elitist culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any given culture. Pop art and Minimalism are considered to be the last Modern art movements and thus the precursors to Contemporary art or Postmodern art.

Origin of the term "pop art"

John McHale originally coined the term "Pop art" in 1954, and he initially developed the concept of Pop art. Alloway was a good friend of McHale's, since the post war era, and both were founding members of the Independent Group, and evidently they were both discussing McHale's Pop art theories in 1954. However, Alloway was also a member of Team 12 at the TIT in 1956, but there is no reference to Alloway using the term Pop art in his exhibit in which he participated with Geoffrey Holroyd and Toni del Renzio.

McHale had thoroughly briefed Richard Hamilton on the tenets of Pop art at the This is Tomorrow (TIT) exhibit at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. Several months later, drawing on McHale's ideas, Hamilton defined Pop art in an unsent letter, as: popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamerous, and Big Business, stressing its everyday, commonplace values. The first to disclose in general terms what was occuring within the ICA mileau on the subject of Pop art was Reyner Banham in an article for an Italian art journal. This was followed by Lawrence Alloway's articles which did not use the specific term Pop art but began to outline some of its concepts in very general terms. Many of the ICA members became cognizant of the term Pop art but tended to avoid the rubric of Pop art when applied to their own work. Artist like Richard Hamilton, who was one of Britain's foremost innovative early Installation artists, at first resisted McHale's Pop art concepts and work, and that is why there was some falling out over the design direction and Team 2 installation at the TIT. That is also part of the reason McHale waited until his return from Yale in mid 1956 to London to provide on site most of the Pop art work for the Team 2 installation at the TIT. However, Hamilton later on after the advent of the TIT, began to appreciate the merits of the Pop art concept and idiom and so he became an innovate Pop artist in his own right and developed the Pop art expression in his own unique style. McHale was creating his Pop art and working for commercial clients such as Revlon, and J. Many of the ICA members were also teaching at the various art schools in London and this disseminated the idea of Pop art among the next generation of creative practitioners in Britain. As a result, Alloway in the 1960's started to publish and lecture on Pop art and apply the concept to rather similar artistic developments that were separately emerging in America since the mid to late 1950s. From there the term was picked up in art circles and by the general press and applied to both British and American art movements.

Pop art in Britain

The first exhibit of Pop art work in Britain was at the Collages and Objects exhibit organized by John McHale and Lawrence Alloway in October 13, 1954, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. McHale also exhibited his Why I Took To The Washers In Luxury Flats which was his early logic gaming Pop art collage that is crammmed full of Pop art media images that can be reprogrammed like manual software by the participant viewer traversing the collage. In August of 1956 McHale contributed most of the Pop art work for the This is Tomorrow exhibit at the ICA. He followed this two months later in November and again in December with numerous Pop art collages including his eleven media laden Heads collages which were exhibit at the ICA. There is no record of Alloway using the term pop art in relation to the communications and signage theme of his contribution to the Group 12 exhibit in 1956. Lawrence Alloway is often incorrectly credited with the first published use of the term "pop art", when in fact he only refers to "mass popular art" in his often cited article in the February 1958 issue of Architectural Design and Construction.

In 1956, members of the Independent Group participated in the exhibition This is Tomorrow at the Whitechapel Art Gallery for which John McHale designed and provided the Pop art visual material, and the Hamiltons along with Magda Cordell did the mechanical cut out and paste up of the collage Just What Is It that Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?. The work's content provides a manifesto for the preoccupations of early Pop art in Britain as well, as the first appearance of the word Pop in this context, which was a deliberate design reference by McHale to the fact that he had designed the collage and coined the term Pop art.

Following This is Tomorrow, McHale continued to develop the Pop art idiom in his Machine Made America and Telemath collage series, and his large Pop art collage mural for Humphrey Lyttelton, and in his numerous works for commercial clients. McHale later on discussed his Pop art concepts with members of the Archigram Group, and used his Pop art theories in his integrative design teaching at American universities. Sometime after the This Is Tomorrow event, Hamilton began exhibiting paintings and collages featuring American cars, consumer goods and Pin-Ups as part of an anthropological study that introduced the element of fetishism that became a major feature of his Pop art. Hamilton had also become a lecturer at the Royal College of Art where he met David Hockney and other younger artists who would develop Pop art in Britain.

Pop art in America

Temporally, the British pop art movement predated the the American one. Roy Lichtenstein was the most popular and one of the most consistent pop art practitioners using stencil-like dots to represent comics or later the simplification/parody of fine art from the vivid pop art perspective. Andy Warhol became the most famous American pop artist using a pseudo-industrial silkscreen process for painting commercial objects such as Campbell's Soup Cans, Coca-cola bottles, for portraying raging celebrity such as Liz Taylor, Jackie Kennedy, and Marilyn Monroe and for portraying the deadpan and banal.

Pop art in Spain

In Spain, the study of Pop art is associated with the “new figurative,” which arose from the roots of the crisis of informalism. Eduardo Arroyo could be said to fit within the Pop art trend, on account of his interest in the environment, his critique of our media culture which incorporates icons of both mass media communication and the history of painting, and his scorn for nearly all established artistic styles.

Pop art in Japan

Pop art in Japan is unique and identifiable as Japanese because of the regular subjects and styles. The most well known pop artist currently in Japan is Takashi Murakami, whose group of artists, Kaikai Kiki is world renowned for their own mass produced but highly abstract and unique Superflat art movement, a surrealist, post modern movement whose inspiration comes mainly from Anime and Japanese street culture, and is mostly aimed at youth in Japan, and has made large cultural impact. Many pop artists in Japan use surreal or obscene, shocking images in their art, which is clearly taken from Japanese Hentai.