Pop Art: The Test of the Object

After the Second World War came the birth of the consumer society. The American way of life, with its emphasis on growth, quantity, consumption and fun, dominated western values. But underneath, many of the same old dark forces raged on: war - Berlin, Korea, Vietnam; racial unrest; the political intolerance of the early 1950s. Among the young, new values awoke, and protest movements sprang up. While existing abstract painting in America - notably Jackson Pollock's - found itself floundering for ideas, Jasper Johns took notice of the object itself, setting his scenes with icons of the familiar and the everyday. The other great founder of Pop Art, Robert Rauschenberg, considered art as something closer to life - the world as one great painting. Meanwhile in California, another parallel track was emerging, based on the deconstruction of technology (Jim Dine), the nature of silence (John Cage), and Roy Lichtenstein's realization that the medium of the printed plate itself generated fertile subject matter - an art seated on the streetcorner, taking the fullest part in life.

Suddenly sociological raw material had become art - Pop Art. There was Tom Wesselmann's American Humdrum, Claes Oldenberg's soda-pop themes - and, inevitably, Andy Warhol, who stuffed the banal images of America back down its throat and then took what was for many the ultimate step and made himself into a living, talking pop object. Yet Pop Art had a third track - for many, its real birthplace was England, where, even more than in California, the most prominent art form was always music. Richard Hamilton also took images from the everyday world, but never abandoned his sensitivity as a painter; nor, in a later period, does David Hockney. In England, Pop Art was never without its personal touch. The film also features the work of Klein, Tinguely, Cesar, Christo, Spoeri, Arman, Raysse and many others.

Part of the series The Adventure of Modern Art