Style of Pop Art

Pop art reacted to the phenomenon of depersonalization in mass society with styles which were equally impersonal, with pictures which had an equally objectivizing effect. The media had changed the relationship between individual subjectivity and mass consciousness, and pop art therefore also wished to redefine the role of individuality in art. In order to come closer to identifying the pop artists' motivation for using various techniques, it is worth looking at how they portrayed the individual in mass society and how they reflected both the human personality and their stereotypes in their work.

As Roy Lichtenstein's Drowning Girl shows, individuals cannot escape the blanket stylization and sentimentalism of the media. Society has become a voyeur, even of personal catastrophes. The media sensationalize thee without disclosing what has led to them - a process in which the media themselves are implicated. For who can predict what effects the mass communications industries will have upon individuals in the long term, what subjective reactions and emotional responses may emerge? Individual fate is statistically too insignificant to hamper the optimism of the times. In Warhol's Suicide Pictures - sensationalist newspaper photographs repeated in cold and grimy rows of canvas - he exploits mass - media techniques to focus on the fate of the individual.

Pop art's conceptions of style stem from one of art's central themes, namely its concern with its own medium: art about art, the work of art as an object, the image, the act of painting, the painting itself, painting materials, packaging, art history, parody, abstraction, composition. Pop artists saw their work as anti - art, at least in relation to traditional notions of art. They expressed this in their depersonalization of style, their anti - subjectivism, in the roles they assumed in mass society and in their redefinition of art itself.

The styles of pop art were the product of the artist's development of technique and choice of subject matter. Their stylistic subjectivity and individuality, however, were neutralized by the anonymity of the environment to which their art responded. Pop art followed various paths, some of them leading in opposite directions. The following were particularly significant: work whose forms and subject matter referred to the structures and methods of the mass media - by actually using mechanical techniques of reproduction, or industrial methods of manufacture (Warhol); or paintings in which the reference to the media takes place primarily through an analysis of their content, and the format reference is stimulated by means of various painterly techniques (Lichtenstein). Lichtenstein's intention in painting such precise representations of the original illustrations is to make us forget that we are looking at a painting. In Warhol's work, subsequent to his early paintings (1960-62), the opposite is the case: his mechanical production techniques do not aim to be perfect, but intentionally include flaws and imprecisions.

In pop art painting there are tendencies whose brash poster - like manner is so accentuated that we forget we are looking at a painting. But there is also work in which painterly technique has a central role. There are mixed media works or assemblages of objects and highly suggestive images, sculptures and environments of "found" reproductions, objects, and materials. Then there are painterly, individualized structures, signs and symbols; then ingeniously executed sculptures and actions with figurative intentions. A comparison of paintings by the German artists Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter reveals that technique and expression often contradict one another at different levels of the work: Polke combines, alienates and trivializes techniques of representation which depict reality as a clich�; Richter's painting analyses the effect the process of reproduction has on its object.

It was a combination of the spirit of the times, cultural theory and a shared understanding of the role of the artist which made pop art into a movement - irrespective of geography or generation. Its exponents, however, had extremely different views of the relations between art and reality, subject and object, content and form. Their contradictory opinions led to extreme polarities in the debate surrounding the term pop art itself - a concept with which the artists only partially identified, if at all.