Alloway defined Pop art as popular, transient, expendable, low cost, mass - produced and oriented toward youth and big business. These terms characterize the works of Richard Hamilton, whose work, Just what is it that makes today's home so different, so appealing? features a muscular man carrying a giant Tootsie Pop.
The origins of the movement can be traced back to the 1920's, when a group of artists who referred to themselves as Dada derided the pomposity of high culture. Their leader, Marcel Duchamp, earned notoriety by painting the Mona Lisa with a moustache and transforming a mass - produced urinal into a sculpture by inverting it.
Pop art developed independently in the United States, where it was represented by major American artists, such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Larry Rivers. Many Pop artists adopted easily recognizable styles - trademarks that granted their work a commercial quality. Roy Liechtenstein, for example, produced paintings that resembled giant comic strips, imitating the field of dots used in real comics. Claes Oldenburg created huge sculptures of mass-produced household objects such as clothespins, lipsticks and type writer erasers. Duane Hanson made sculptures so life - like that when placed in a museum they could be mistaken for visitors. Andy Warhol mechanically mass - produced images of celebrities, such as Marilyn Monroe and Chairman Mao, and Campbell's Soup cans - thereby reducing human begins to the level of consumer products.
Where as British Pop artists tended either to mock or glorify popular culture, their American counterparts were more inclined towards ambiguous images. Warhol's silk screens of car wrecks and the Kennedy assassination are both tragic and commercial. The ultimate aim of both groups, however, was to demonstrate that capitalism had desecrated art by transforming it into just one more object of consumption. Wall Art Prints
