Pop Art design is a fine art movement that reigned in the mid-1950s and 60s that largely focused on representations of popular, American pop culture iconography. Representations ranged from Roy Liechtenstein’s reproductions of actual comic book panels, to stylized, such as Richard Hamilton’s magazine collages. In contrast to artwork that highlighted the hand of an artist, Pop Art routinely mimicked the impersonal and machine-driven graphics of commercial products.

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Pop Art characteristics-

• Subject matter featuring popular Americana such as celebrities, advertisements, shopping catalogues and comic books

• Mass production techniques such as halftone printing

• Excessive repetition

• Image reproductions with substituted colours

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In this movement, artists reclaimed the subject matter of art from religion or bourgeois portraits to scenes of ordinary people in order to show American life as it truly was.

American life had changed drastically. Industrialization had introduced mass production and crowded urban centres. Later, the end of World War II and the economic boom that followed brought about a mass migration to the suburbs.

At the same time, advertising was ramping up as a defined industry, helped by new technology like the radio and television.

Many of the advertising campaigns showed family barbecues, housewives in full hair and make-up showing off the latest appliance, enjoying a Coca Cola, both reflected and shaped the ideal suburban life – ‘The American Dream’. American culture during this period were largely tied to television, movies and commercialism.

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The Pop Art artists

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British artist, Peter Blake (b. 1932), often combined US pop culture iconography with those from the UK. His album sleeve for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band famously features a multitude of cultural icons standing behind the Beatles, from Bob Dylan to Fred Astaire and Shirley Temple.

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Rosalyn Drexler (b. 1926) constructed her paintings out of collaged images, often appropriated from pulp movie posters and painted over them with bold, minimal colours.

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Andy Warhol is often recognized as Pop Art’s celebrity, he is ultimately as iconic as those he depicted, and much of his work did come to encapsulate what Pop Art was all about. His famous Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962) was reproduced and displayed in rows and columns - an artistic display of supermarket shelves. His Marylin Diptych (1962) pioneered Pop Art silk screening to reproduce portraits of the late Marylin Monroe.

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In more recent times, artists from Takashi Murakami to Banksy have carried the torch of Pop Art into the modern age.

One of the biggest names in the contemporary art world, Japanese artist Takashi Murakami's work is immediately recognizable for its popping, candylike colours and anime aesthetic. Often featuring playful imagery like smiling flowers, oversized, blinking eyes, Murakami is truly the heir to Warhol in his ability to appropriate commercial, popular images inspired by anime and manga (Japanese comics) into high-quality pieces of fine art. 

 

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Pop Art design is a dynamic, joyful art style that has managed to stick around for half a century, which is not surprising given how versatile it is as an aesthetic.