Pop Art

Pop Art

The name Pop Art emerged from "popular art." The pop art movement developed firstly in England and America as a response to abstract painting, because pop artist thought that it was too mach elite and sophisticated. They favored using images of things that we use on our daily basis, like Andy Worhol Campbell's soup can and Roy Lichtenstein's comic strips. They used cartoon-like bulbous typefaces and fluorescent colours. Warhol manly made use of serigraphy, photo realistic, mass production and printmaking techniques, which were also the typical characteristics of the pop art movement.

Supporters of the pop movement were influenced by the mass consumerism and popular culture. They questioned the rules of good design. While rejecting modernism and the values they had, they replaced them with its own fun, variety, change, disrispect, and disposability.

Drawings were inspired from "low art" which advertised, packaging, televisions and comics. Artist like Andy Worhol and David Hockney, with their citation to mass culture, crossed over into interiors, wallpaper, posters and murals, starting a whole new world of fun in art and design.

The Independent Group was founded in London in 1952. It was the first group to dig and explore the growth of the popular culture that was happening in America. They've targeted a new type of design-concious young professionals. Designers all of a sudden realized that they needed a new juvenile and alternative approach to that advertised by the Good Design of the 1950s.

Terence Conranstated stated, "there was a strange moment around the  mid 1960s when people stopped needing and need changed to want...Designers became more important in producing 'want' products rather than 'need' products."

Product styling became socially obligatory, sustaining the throwaway society we have accepted as the norm. For most designers, plastic was the preferred material because they wanted to use bight and bold colours to attract the younger generations. Products were often of bad quality and very cheap, but disposability bacame part of the social aspect in a very short time, and also it became a part of the attraction, as the creator and consumer wanted non durable objects. The modernists would have shot them for doing such thing!

References

Bhaskaran, L. (2005). Designs of the times. Mies: RotoVision.

Saturday trip to see the pop art exhibition at the Barbican | Daisy Vasanthakumar. 2015. Saturday trip to see the pop art exhibition at the Barbican | Daisy Vasanthakumar. [ONLINE] Available at:https://daisyvgraphics.wordpress.com/2014/01/25/saturday-trip-to-see-the-pop-art-exhibition-at-the-barbican/. [Accessed 31 January 2015].

Barbican Blog — Pop Art Design - An Introduction. 2015. Barbican Blog — Pop Art Design - An Introduction. [ONLINE] Available at:http://barbicancentre.tumblr.com/post/61601990970/popartdesign. [Accessed 31 January 2015].