POP ART

POP-ART

Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art presented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular culture such as advertising, news, etc. In Pop art, material is sometimes visually removed from its known context, isolated, and/or combined with unrelated material. The concept of pop art refers not as much to the art itself as to the attitudes that led to it. Pop art employs aspects of mass culture, such as advertising, comic books and mundane cultural objects. It is widely interpreted as a reaction to the then-dominant ideas of abstract expressionism, as well as an expansion upon them. A London-based group of young painters, writers, critics and sculptors, The Independent Group, pioneered the exploration of Pop Art in Britain and coined its name as well, to denote art stemming from popular mass culture. Pop art is considered to be art movement that precede postmodern art. Some prominent artists of the movement were Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, David Hockney, Tom Wesselman and Richard Hamilton.


David Hockney

An important contributor to the Pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the twentieth century.He was associated with the movement pop art, but his early works also display expressionist elements, not dissimilar to certain works by Francis Bacon. Sometimes, as in We Two Boys Together Clinging, named after a poem by Walt Whitman, these works make reference to his love for men. From 1963, Hockney was represented by the art dealer John Kasmin. In 1963 Hockney visited New York, making contact with Andy Warhol. A subsequent visit to California, where he lived for many years, inspired Hockney to make a series of paintings of swimming pools in Los Angeles, using the comparatively new acrylic medium and rendered in a highly realistic style using vibrant colours. In 1967, his painting, Peter Getting Out Of Nick's Pool, won the John Moores Painting Prize at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool