Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Pop art is now most associated with the work of New York artists of the early
1960s. Pop artists celebrated commonplace objects and people of everyday
life, in this way seeking to elevate popular culture to the level of fine art. Pop
artists seemingly embraced the post-WWII manufacturing and media boom.
The actual term "Pop art" has several possible origins:
the first use of the term in writing has been attributed to both Lawrence
Alloway and Alison and Peter Smithson, and alternately to Richard Hamilton,
who defined Pop in a letter
the first artwork to incorporate the word "Pop" was produced by
Paolozzi. His collage
http://www.phaidon.com/resource/acvr-059a.jpg
Sigmar Polke in 1963 and included artists Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg as
its central members. The Capitalist Realists sought to expose the consumerism
and superficiality of contemporary capitalist society by using the imagery and
aesthetic of popular art and advertising within their work.
Girlfriends, 1965 Sigmar Polke,
http://www.artfund.org/assets/what-to-see/exhibitions/2014/sigmar
%20polke/Sigmar-Polke-Girlfriends-(Freundinnen).jpg
Nouveau Ralisme in France
In France, the equivalent of Pop art was Nouveau Ralisme, a movement
launched by the critic Pierre Restany in 1960, with the drafting of the
"Constitutive Declaration of New Realism," that proclaimed, "Nouveau Ralisme
- new ways of perceiving the real."The declaration was signed in Yves Klein's
workshop by nine artists who were united in their direct appropriation of mass
culture.
Key proponents of the movement are Yves
Klein, Jean Tinguely, Arman, Francois Dufrne,
Raymond Hains, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Christo.
Op Art
Op, or Optical, art typically employs abstract patterns composed with a stark
contrast of foreground and background - often in black and
white for maximum contrast - to produce effects that confuse
and excite the eye. Op artists being drawn to virtual movement.
It seemed the perfect style for an age defined by the onward
march of science, by advances in computing, aerospace, and
television. But art critics were never so supportive of it,
attacking its effects as gimmicks, and today it remains tainted
by those dismissals.
It was launched with Le Mouvement, a group exhibition at
Galerie Denise Rene in 1955. It attracted a wide international following, and
after it was celebrated with a survey exhibition in 1965, The Responsive Eye, at
the Museum of Modern Art in New York,
Victor Vasarely (1906 1997), was a HungarianFrench artist, who is widely
accepted as a "grandfather" and leader of the short-lived op art movement.
Arte Povera - "poor art" or "impoverished art" - was the most significant and
influential avant-garde movement to emerge in Europe in the 1960s. Believing
that modernity threatened to erase our sense of memory along with all signs of
the past, the Arte Povera group sought to contrast the new and the old in order
to complicate our sense of the effects of passing time.
In addition to opposing the technological design of American Minimalism,
artists associated with Arte Povera also rejected what they perceived as its
scientific rationalism.
Luciano Fabro was an Italian artist, theorist and author associated the Arte
Povera movement, and is often cited as the
unofficial father of the movement
Floor Tautology (1967)
http://www.theartstory.org/images20/pnt/pnt_arte_povera_1.jp
Neo-Expressionism (1970-1990)
Because Neo-Expressionism accepted and rejuvenated historical and
mythological imagery -- as opposed to the modernists' tendency to reject
storytelling some scholars believe that Neo Expressionism played an important
role in the transition from modernism to postmodernism.
Many artists have practiced and revived aspects of the original Expressionism
movement. Georg Baselitz led a revival that dominated
German art in the 1970s. By the 1980s, this resurgence had
become part of an international return to the sensuousness
of painting - and away from the stylistically cool, distant
sparseness of Minimalism and Conceptualism.
Bibliography
http://www.theartstory.org/
http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collectiononline/movements/195230