Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid-1950s in Britain. Pop art challenged the traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular culture such as advertising, news, comic books, and everyday objects. In pop art, those materials are sometimes visually removed from its known context, isolated, and/or combined with unrelated material. Pop Art appreciates popular culture, or what we also call “material culture.” It does not critique the consequences of materialism and consumerism; it simply recognizes its pervasive presence as a natural fact.

Pop Art is widely interpreted as a reaction to the then-dominant ideas of

abstract expressionism. Rebelling against the emotion and feeling of abstract art, they wanted to express their optimism after so much hardship in their visual language. Pop art aimed to use images of popular as opposed to elitist culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any given culture, most often through the use of irony. It is also associated with the artists' use of mechanical means of reproduction or rendering techniques.

Abstract Expressionism

Andy Warhol was a commercial artist that liked to repeat images to symbolize mass produced Items that he portrayed in his commercial art

Elizabeth Taylor

portrait

Warhol took photographs and separated out the values. He did this by hand since there were no computers in The 1950’s. He used unique bright colors on the images.

Warhol used these images to do silkscreen print portraits.

Marilyn Monroe

Andy Warhol’s self portrait

Jackie Kennedy

.

http://www.govart.org/winners/2009Winners/t25_Flannery.jpg