History of Pop Art in America

American pop art was a child of the newly found self - confidence with which American art had asserted itself in the fifties against European influence. The subject matter which provided the initial impulse was Americanism itself. The idea of progress, the media industry and the star - cult were experiencing a boom in Hollywood and, more especially, in New York, the cultural center of the USA. In relating their art to the present day, artists were able to build on New York tradition. Around the turn of the century, the Ash Can School had sought its roots to the milieu of American life - especially that of the "lower classes" - and had repudiated the "l'art pour l'art" of European Impressionism. At the great Armory Show of 1913 in New York, American artists had demonstrated an inclination for European abstract formalism; but they had also exhibited a regional art whose subject matter was American life, the new technology and the dawning of the media age. These antithetical positions - a more introverted art on the one hand, which was centered on formal accomplishment, and on the other, an art committed to material reality, to the world about it - continued to unfold throughout the twenties and thirties. During the upheavals of the forties and fifties, the generation which preceded pop art brought forth a new tendency in realism using contemporary subject matter, which paved the way for the American art of the sixties. Guided by the changes which were occurring in society, a younger generation of artists had begun to outgrow the abstract - expressionist style of the fifties, whose development and success they had partly experienced themselves as pupils, and to replace it with a new art of contemporary relevance.

A work by Robert Rauschenberg, Erased de Kooning Drawing, is highly symbolic of the process by which this generation cut through its umbilical attachment to the preceding one. It documents the act of eliminating, drawing, rubbing out one of Willem de Kooning's abstract - expressionist drawings. The traces of this actions, the smudges, are clearly visible on the paper, the original outlines of the drawing can only be guessed at. De Kooning had no objection to Rauschenberg's intervention and provided him the drawing himself. From 1951- 53, Rauschenberg had been painting monochromatic pictures with fabric patterns, while de Kooning had begun to introduce elements of collage into his paintings.

Rauschenberg's encounter with John Cage, who was also teaching at Black Mountain College, was highly significant both for his artistic development and also for the direction later taken by American pop art. The composer Cage was intensely interested in Zen Buddhism, in the incorporation of chance into artistic technique and in absorbing levels of trvial reality into his musical language, which he composed as a kind of objective process, or action. It was Cage who posed the first important theoretical questions about the relationships between art and the media, between representation and reality: Was a truck in a music school more musical than a truck driving past on the street?

This nonsense question, which was both seriously meant and seriously taken by those who heard it, was followed by another, which, for some time, dominated, or rather, disturbed the art scene in general, and the first critical interpretations of pop art in particular. Jasper Johns, who was painting his first American flag pictures at this time, added the absurd question: "Is it a flag or is it a painting?" Johns' intention here was to subvert prevalent conceptions of reality and certain habitual modes of perception, and to open the channels through which art was mediated for a new, objectivist realism. Johns, is generally seen as being the second most important figure of pre - pop art in New York. In 1958, his post - 1954 flag and target paintings were shown in a private New York gallery and provoked quite a controversy. Johns' pictures subverted the structural approach of the New York art scene and undermined what was generally expected of art.

The use of collage and assemblage, of simple techniques borrowed from the media and commercial design and the direct incorporation of levels of contingent reality into painting and sculpture sparked off a number of debates and experiments in the late fifties which were centered on new art, indeed on a new understanding of art altogether. The issue at stake here was not so much that of the status of trivial material in art, but whether art could do creative justice to this important new subject matter, and what the nature of this encounter with the products of the media should be. To what extent should art allow itself to become trivial in order to unmask triviality? Responding to the challenge, the New York artists didn't look for their solutions in theory or by forming stylistic groups, but by examining their own experience of everyday life and artistic techniques. In so doing, they arrived at very different conclusions and produced highly individual paintings and sculptures. They also explored the way in which the context which had produced these questions was constantly changing and throwing up new questions.

The development of American pop art occurred in four phases, marking different responses by artists to the challenge of their times. The first was the pre - pop phase, in which Johns and Rauschenberg took their leave of abstract expressionism. Then came the heyday of pop art: this phase saw the emergence of important artists whose work was rooted in the fifties and partly founded on experience acquired in commercial art, design and poster painting: Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Tom Wesselmann and Robert Indiana. Quite independently of one another, these artists went about translating objects and figures into vehicles of generalized statements.

Between 1960 - 62 the work of the later pop stars Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein went through an important stage in its development; a meticulousness learned from the mass media and their intransigent pictorial vocabulary were characteristics these artists shared. During the following years of the sixties, Claes Oldenburg, Tom Wesselmann, and James Rosenquist laid the conceptual foundations for later directions taken by pop art. It was during this period too that Jasper Johns made his frivolous metal sculptures, Larry Rivers painted pictures with bank notes and Camel cigarette packets, Robert Indiana produced his object - sculpture Cuba and George Brecht his cupboard object Repository. The year 1961 is generally seen as a watershed. By that year, formal techniques had been so consistently and uncompromisingly employed, had attained such a degree of rigor, clarity precision that pop art was able to establish itself for the first time in New York as a new direction in art - from now on it was discussed, written about and collected. Pop art, which the British art critic Lawrence Alloway had originally coined to allude to the trivial, commonplace and secondhand realities artists were incorporating into their work, now became the accepted term for the new American art.

Though its detractors were vociferous, pop soon became the object of a euphoric enthusiasm of cult dimensions among the American population. The ludic qualities of these paintings and sculptures, their irony and entertainment value easily lent themselves to a kind of affirmative consumer misinterpretation: "Some of the worst things about pop art have come from its admirers," as Tom Wesselmann put it on 1963, referring to the superficial manner in which even those paintings were consumed which attempted to reflect and undermine the consumer mentality. This phenomenon derived from the matter - of - factness of pop art, which was intended to stimulate the viewer's own capacity for self - analysis. As a side effect, it is understandable, for the artists themselves had a kind of love - hate relationship with the things they were portraying and were themselves fascinated by the triteness of their subject matter. Yet another reason was the artists' command of commercial imagery and use of this prowess in their work: Warhol had designed shoes; Rosenquist had painted billboards; Rauschenberg had become a commercial artist; Lichtenstein had arranged window displays; Oldenburg had worked as an illustrator and designer; Wesselmann had drawn cartoons. In this respect, these artists were trained professionals. Their professionalism led viewers to read their pictorial vocabulary as if it were the language of advertising. This was also taken up by commercial pop, the pop bric - a brac industry. The influence of pop on advertising grew accordingly - and can still be detected today.

Contact between New York and West Coast artists can be traced back as far as 1960. New York pop art was first shown in Los Angeles in 1962. Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans and the work of other New York and West Coast pop artists was also exhibited in private galleries. The group exhibition "The New Painting of Common Objects" organized by Walter Hopps at the Pasadena Art Museum, with work by Lichtenstein, Dine, Warhol, Ruscha, Goode, Thiebaud, and others, was intended as a combined exposition of the New York and Los Angeles art scenes. In 1963, the Los Angeles County Museum included West Coast painters in the exhibition "Six Painters and the Object", which Lawrence Alloway had originally devised for the Guggenheim Museum in New York.