Pop Art

Pop art is a visual language that made mass culture, advertising, the comic strip and the consumer product the very subject of art. Its core idea is to erase the boundary between "high" and "low" and to raise the everyday, ironically, to the rank of an aesthetic object. Formally, pop art employs bright local colours, crisp contours, flat planes and the devices of reproduction printmaking. Characteristic motifs are tin cans, cola bottles, film stars, road signs, and comic-book covers and frames. Technically, its artists readily turned to silkscreen, photomechanical printing and the halftone dot, emphasising the serial and impersonal nature of the image. Composition is often built on repetition, the enlargement of a detail, or the collage-like juxtaposition of recognisable signs. Emotional distance and cool irony distinguish pop art from the expressive abstraction against which it arose. The movement flourished in late-1950s Britain and reached its peak in the United States of the 1960s. Its icon was Andy Warhol, with his reproduced portraits of Marilyn Monroe and his Campbell's soup cans. Roy Lichtenstein carried the language of the comic, with its Ben-Day dots, into high art, while Claes Oldenburg made giant soft replicas of ordinary objects. The British line is represented by Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi. Pop art critically reflects on consumer society while relishing its glitter. Today it is prized for its visual punch, conceptual edge and lasting influence on design and advertising.