The mid 50s brought about many changes. As I said in the previous blog discussing the New York School, it was a time where a lot of things where happening. An important movement that has influenced modern graphic design was Pop Art.

Pop Art is associated with New York 1960s, however it actually began in 1950s England moving to American in the late 50s. Pop art was very much based on and reflected people’s everyday lives during those times. The ‘pop’ title is actually known to come from people’s return to popular culture, which is derived from the popular activities of those times; those being the pleasures that came with the time: television, comics, and magazines. 

As post-war America began thriving with the economic boom and the middle class increasing, Pop art reflected all this increase in materialism and consumerism. The movement was mainly characterized by bold, simple, everyday imagery all inspired by the daily visual elements from mass media. 

Another very important element was the bright colour scheme used. In fact these bright colours helped narrow the divide between the commercial arts and the fine arts. It was the first post-modernist movement to show how effective visual imagery was taking inspiration that where used and seen daily on film and television.

The Pop Art movement also featured various design elements such as collage, sculpture painting and even street art. Robert Rauschenberg was one of the designers of this time who was well known for his ‘Combines’ collages where he created compositions composed of non-traditional materials and objects into innovative formats. As a painter and sculptor, he also worked with typography and printmaking, which made his works more visually appealing. (Visual Arts Cork, 2009)

Roy Lichtenstein is my favorite pop artist best known for his boldly colored parodies of comic strips and advertisements. I admire his work simply for his blank humor and his ingeniously rebellious way of building a signature body of work from mass-reproduced images. Like much Pop Art, it provoked debate over ideas of originality, consumerism and the fine line between fine art and entertainment.

Pop Art was so well known for its characteristics of using images from the popular items used in everyone’s day to day life of the 60s that it had been the main emphasis of the works of that time and designers didn’t even seem to think twice about including such items in their works. Andy Warhol, took this routine, and experimented with silkscreen printing. Similarly to other artists of the time, Warhol used images from mass produced work and created various versions of the same image, such as his infamous reproductions of the silkscreens or Marilyn Monroe.

The influence of Pop Art can still be seen in works done in contemporary times today such as Lobo’s fantastic interpretation of the movement. Lobo is an artist from Sao Paulo Brazil. His style is extremely influential from Pop Art making use of a very bright mix of colours, stencils of illustrations as well as overused imagery. (PAULOV2, 2012)