Pop Art History

John McHale (Sr.) with Self-Portrait (Photo: Sam Lambert) (Pop art founder in England)

John McHale (born Maryhill, Glasgow 1922, died Houston, Texas 1978) was an artist and sociologist. He was a founder member of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and a founder of the Independent Group, which was a British movement that originated Pop Art which grew out of a fascination with American mass culture and post-WWII technologies. McHale originally coined the term "Pop art" in 1954.

"Pop" Art refers to "popular culture". It is an art used with commercialism. The Pop Art Movement eliminated distinctions between "good" and "bad" taste and between fine art and commercial art techniques.

This is a collage by Richard Hamilton (1956). The work is now in the collection of the Kunsthalle Tubingen, Tubingen, Germany. It was the first work of pop art to achieve iconic status.

Hamilton created this for the catalog of the This Is Tomorrow exhibition held in London, England in August 1956 in which it was reproduced in black and white. This had also been used in posters for the exhibit.

Pop art from Wikipedia.

Temporally, the British pop art movement predated the American one. Pop art stating in the early 1960s in the United States. 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.

Roy Lichtenstein's Drowning Girl (1963) on display at the Museum of Modern Art, New York

Roy Lichtenstein was very much a "comic-strip" artist and produced masses of works using imagery from comics. Starting out in 1960, he painted vastly-inflated images of comic-strip frames formed from the dots of color newsprint. During the same year, Oldenburg set about carving his own niche in the pop art world, creating large, painted plaster sculptures of sandwiches and cakes! These were soon followed by huge plastic appliances that were softened to allow them to give a distinctive "droop". All of it was designed explore the nature of "consumer culture" that was sweeping the nations on both sides of the Atlantic.

Sometimes called 32 Campbell's Soup Cans, produced by Andy Warhol in 1962. It consists of thirty-two canvases, each measuring 20 inches (510 mm) in height × 16 inches (410 mm) in width and each consisting of a painting of a Campbell's Soup can. One of each of the canned soup varieties the company offered at the time. The individual paintings were produced with a semi-mechanized silkscreen process, using a non-painterly style.

Andy Warhol, known as a commercial illustrator showed the work on July 9 1962 in his first one-man gallery exhibition as an artist in the Ferus Gallery of Los Angeles, California. The exhibition marked the West Coast debut of pop art; which is now displayed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Andy Warhol's fame elevated after his "Campbell's Soup Cans" work was produced and featured in separate works - firstly as individual "cans" and then the same cans aligned in immaculate rows. Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy, possibly the biggest 60s female icons at the time, were also given the "Warhol treatment" in which he silk screened their images, altered the colors and reproduced them in repeated patterns.

Machines have less problems. I'd like to be a machine, wouldn't you? -Andy Warhol, 1963
In the future everybody will be world famous for 15 minutes. -Andy Warhol, 1975
Andy Warhol became fabulously famous for his 1960s pop art. He produced big, bold images of the popular, the famous, and the stuff of our consumer society. His multi-image portraits of famous people-Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Jacqueline Kennedy-and of common products-Campbell's soup cans, Brillo pad boxes, Coca Cola bottles-are among the most powerful icons of twentieth-century American art.