The Pop Art movement sprung up as a result of a fascination with popular culture, and affluent post war society. Pop Art appeared in the 1950’s and endured through to the 1960’s. The movement originally grew out of America but quickly spread to Britain. Pop Art celebrated simple every day objects such as soup cans, soap, washing powder, pop bottles, and comic strips, and in effect, turned commonplace items into icons. Pop Art was directly influenced by Dadaism in that it pokes fun at the traditional art world by using images from the streets and supermarkets, and suggesting that they are art forms in themselves.
Pop Art encompasses definitions of the popular, the expendable, the mass produced, the young, witty and sexy, and the glamorous. Andy Warhol is Pop Art’s most notable artist in that he brought the art form to the public eye. He created numerous screen prints of Coke bottles, Campbell’s soup tins, and film stars such as Marilyn Monroe. This in effect contributed to the iconography of the 20th century. Pop Art embraced commercial techniques by creating machine produced art, which set artists apart from the previous introspective styles of the Abstract Expressionists. Famous Pop Artists include Richard Hamilton, Andy Warhol, David Hockney, Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Tom Wesselmann, and Robert Rauschenberg.
David Hockney
David Hockney was born in 1937 in Yorkshire, England and attended the Royal College of Art in London. David Hockney's early works consisted of a series of paintings based on homoerotic life. His paintings of swimming pools associated him with the Pop Art movement which was at its peak in Britain and the USA in the early 60's. David Hockney also painted portraits of celebrities, friends, and fashion gurus who came to represent the culture of the times. David Hockney worked in Paris in the 1970's but settled in Los Angeles in 1976. David Hockney established a painting style that consisted of cleanlienss and flatness in his rendition of people and landscapes. David Hockney is known for his realist approach to paintings and his use of clear and bright colors. David Hockney also worked in designing sets for the theatre and opera in New York, London, Paris, and Los Angeles. By the 1980's David Hockney was creating pieces that resembled the Cubist movement, where he'd create compositions from photographs and pieces of photographs.
