History of Pop Art in Britain

British pop art arose out of a new understanding of contemporary life. It was intellectual, interdisciplinary and programmatic in character. Detailed study shows that its emergence as an artistic phenomenon was gradual, developing out of the wider cultural context in Britain at the time.

In the early fifties artists and intellectuals began to realize that their culture was increasingly determined by the mass media, by new technology and by social change, and that this process was also leading to the increased Americanization of Europe. This cultural transformation was not reflected in the introverted, expressive, abstract - figurative art of the older generation of British artists, such as Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland or Barbara Hepworth. It was, however, with these conditions In mind that the Independent Group was convened in 1952 to hold informal discussions and cultural events at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London. The Group was not large, nor did it convene particularly frequently. Despite their heterogeneous cultural and professional provenance, its members found an area of contact in the interdisciplinary interests of the Group. But it was also this heterogeneity which determined the sheer variety of subjects they discussed and the priority they attached to approaching problems from an anthropological rather than artistic point of view.

Two members of the Group, Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi, are generally seen as the father of London's pop art. The starting signal was a lecture held at the first meeting of the Independent Group in 1952. The lecture, entitled Bunk, was delivered by Eduardo Paolozzi, born of Italian parents and brought up in Scotland. Bunk was a kind of projected collage using pictures mostly from American illustrated magazines, from comics and science fiction literature; a jumble of images from the media and advertising. Projected onto screens, their insistent banality and trivial components were intensified to irritating effect.

Richard Hamilton was teaching design at the Royal College of Art in London, where the young artists Peter Blake and Richard Smith were studying. Paolozzi taught textile design from 1949-55 at the Central School of Art and Design in London, and from 1955-58 at St. Martin's School of Art, also in London. Blake and Smith belonged to the second generation of British pop art. Blake's work inclined strongly towards figurative realism, while Smith tended towards pronounced abstraction.

While the first phase of British pop art had focused on performed media imagery, the impulses for its second phase came from a more immediate appreciation for its changes in society and their influence on the personality. During this period Peter Blake was working on collages, assemblages and paintings which combined mass - produced imagery with abstract signs and suggestively decorative fields of color. Even abstract painters like Robyn Denny used the pure colors and generous arrangements of form in their non - representational compositions to refer to the new levels of perception and the relation of these to the new subject matter in art - as the ironic tiles of his paintings suggest.

The influence of pop art spread quickly, both in geographical terms (Cambridge University) and among the younger generation. In 1958, R.B. Kitaj came to London on a scholarship and decided to stay on there. It was largely due to his influence that British pop art responded with such intensity to American imagery and the early phase of American pop art. Later, Richard Smith and Peter Blake visited America themselves. A third phase of British pop art developed and made its presence publicly felt for the first time in exhibition "Young Contemporaries" in 1960 - the first exhibition to provide a general survey of the new art movement. Once again, Lawrence Alloway wrote the text of the catalogue. He did so without using the term "pop art" for these young artists: Barrie Bats, Derek Boshier, Patrick Caulfield, David Hockney, Allen Jones, R.B. Kitaj, Peter Philips and Norman Toynton.

The representatives of the third, and last generation of pop artists whose use of media language was the most pronounced, the most conceptual and intellectual were Peter Philips, Patrick Caulfield and Joe Tilson. Philips transformed his conception of the machine age into dynamic forms, uninhibitedly exploiting the language of advertising. He sees technology as the mirror of natural and vital laws which technology deceives, commercializes and destroys. His harsh paintings visualize the nightmare of a vicious circle releasing its aggression, propaganda and chaos into an overcharged atmosphere.

Pop art in Britain - as in America - was an art about art and style. Joe Tilson's work A - Z a contributive picture is an encyclopedic collection of art and the questions relating to it, a diagrammatic assemblage of trivial objects. A number of artists, members of Tilson's family and friends contributed to it; their contributions are like "objets trouves", objects found in everyday life. Among the artists were: Frank Auerbach, Peter Blake, Clive Barker, David Hockney, Eduardo Paolozzi, Bob Freeman, Herald Cohen, Allen Jones, R.B. Kitaj, John Latham, Tony Messenger, Peter Philips, Richard Hamilton, Richard Smith, Anthony Caro and Brian Wall. Joe Tilson himself added the "NO" and "?" to the box and made the attachment "A - Z" in the form of a radiant star - reminding us, perhaps, that the stars and gods of art come and go.