It Changes With Seasons: Pop art: when the ordinary is not ordinary but extraordinary

"Just what is it that makes Today's homes so different, so appealing?"

Could everything that surrounds us be art? What characteristics define an art work? Has it to be something related to the highest level of knowledge? Until the 20th century these limits were clearly known, but it was the time for great changes to appear thanks to Charles Darwin’s scientific approaches or Albert Einstein’s breakthrough which enabled us to stop thinking of a world into the hegemony of God, but of a one in which men control everything surrounding everyone. Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis also helped make this break and change most people’s minds.

"I was a Rich's Man Plathing". 1947. Eduardo Paolozzi.
One of the first works of the Independent Group.

It is in the late Modern period when a relevant movement turns up, it was the beginning of Pop Art. Its first expressions take place in Britain in the mid 50s (The Independent Group was the pioneer and precursor, founded by Eduardo Paolozzi) and in The United States at the end of them. It is true that the most famous people involved in this movement were American: the importance of Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselmann and, specially, Andy Warhol is clear. If Modernism was a kind of art consisting on making everyday things into something artistic and worth copying and getting inspired of, Pop Art is way too drastic. Pop art outfaced classical tradition by abusing of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture in contrast to the perspective of high cultivated art. Pop art removes the material from its original context and isolates it, or combines it with other objects, for contemplation. The concept of pop art refers not as much to the art itself as to the attitudes that led to it.

This term was first used in 1954 to name the “popular art” that was creating disciplines such as publicity, industrial design, illustrated magazines or posters. It is characterized by the use of a figurative and real language reflecting customs and ideas of the modern times. All this new art is seen as a consequence of the tiredness provoked by the abstract expressionism that was being (extra)used by some artists and the struggle of other who tried to put art back in contact with reality and the earthly world, in other words, easier for people to understand and appreciate.

Drowning Girl, by Roy Lichtenstein

Turning to Pop Art itself, I will focus on one of the most representative and well-known artists of that period mentioned above: Andy Warhol. He was a complete artist in the most Greco-roman sense of the word: he was not only a painter, but also a print and film-maker, author and member of highly diverse social circles and a big influence on the people surrounding him and interested in the new ways of art. Still nowadays, many of the questions he opened are a mystery. Why did he have that obsession with soup cans, for instance? The Dada artist Marcel Duchamp, one of the greatest from Modernism once said: "If you take a Campbell Soup Can and repeat it fifty times, you are not interested in the retinal image. What interests you is the concept that wants to put fifty Campbell soup cans on a canvas." As we can see in the article “Andy Warhol and the Social Construction of the Late Modern Artist” by David Deitcher, Pop Art was the resolution for both high and kind of “low” concepts of what art should be: “Pop artists could slide back and forth with unprecedented ease along an axis that extends between high aesthetic structures and those of industrial production. This cannot be explained solely in aesthetic terms: as a side effect of their repudiation of Abstract Expressionism, or of their putatively "realist" response to a new American landscape.”. If we have to wonder whether this movement was a revolution or not, the answer may be yes in the wide sense of the term. It was not only a way of representing the views and emotions of the artists through different forms (a canvas or a building itself) but a new way of getting closer to people using everyday objects (even though they barely understand the deep meaning). Warhol himself didn’t think he made a job that differs a lot from a teacher’s, for instance (“Why do people think artists are special? It's just another job.”). Pop art should be also understood as an art created for the new circumstances of the 50s’ society and the new media and formats such as comics or the necessity of publicity; in other words, we have to see it as an attempt to readjust art to the new necessities.