Pop art started with the New York artists Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, and Claes Oldenburg, in the mid 1950s to late 1970s, all who drew upon popular imagery to challenge the mainstream ideologies at the time.
By creating paintings or sculptures of mass culture objects and media stars, the Pop art movement aimed to blur the boundaries between "high" art and "low" culture. The concept that there is no hierarchy of culture and that art may borrow from any source has been one of the most influential characteristics of Pop art.
Sir Eduardo Luigi Paolozzi (1924 – 2005) was a Scottish sculptor and artist. He is widely considered to be one of the pioneers of pop art in Europe.
I Was a Rich Man's Plaything (1922) was an important foundational work for the Pop art movement, combining pop culture documents like a pulp fiction novel cover, a Coca-Cola advertisement, and a military recruitment advertisement. The work highlights the darker tone of British Pop art, which reflected more upon the gap between the glamour and affluence present in American popular culture and the economic and political hardship of British reality.
It is made from different pieces of commercially printed paper that is stuck onto a single piece of card that is slightly narrower than a single page of a tabloid newspaper. The negative space around the pieces isn't structured in anyway and only has elements of wear and tear which emphasises the age of the art.
The biggest collage element takes up the top two thirds of the work. Thus seeing the arrangement from left to right.
Paolozzi emphasized the impact of technology and mass culture on high art. His use of collage demonstrates the influence of Surrealist and Dadaist photomontage, which Paolozzi implemented to recreate the barrage of mass media images experienced in everyday life.
Roy Lichtenstein grounded his inventive career in imitation, beginning by appropriating images from advertisements and comic books in the early 1960s.
Lichtenstein did not simply copy comic pages directly, he employed a complex technique that involved cropping images to create entirely new, dramatic compositions. In Drowning Girl (1963), Lichtenstein sourced the image from the comic ' Run for Love'. Lichtenstein composed this piece in a way that the cropping creates implied space, creating enticement as to what else is surrounding the girl.
The original composition included the woman's boyfriend standing on a boat above her. Lichtenstein also condensed the text of the comic book panels, locating language as another, crucial visual element; re-appropriating this emblematic aspect of commercial art for his paintings further challenged existing views about definitions of "high" art.
As with the rest of Pop Art, it is often unclear whether Lichtenstein is applauding the comic book image, and the general cultural sphere to which it belongs, or critiquing it, leaving interpretation up to the viewer.
Until Next Time, Live and Laugh,
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