The art movement that relates more to my photography style is a mix of Pop Art and Surrealism. Both have similar characteristics as they are from the 50’s and 60’s.
I’ll start talking about Pop Art, its century, influences, artists and the concept.
Pop Art was born on the post war consumer boom of the 1950’s and 1960’s. Pop Art was the art of popular culture, it was the visual art movement that characterised a sense of optimism in those years and coincided with the globalization of pop music and youth culture, personified by Elvis and the Beatles which influenced the art movement. Pop Art was brash, young and fun and hostile to the artistic establishment. It included different styles of painting and sculpture from various countries, but what they all had in common was an interest in mass-media, mass-production and mass-culture.
Iconic Artists of the movement:
-David Hockney
-Jasper Johns
-Roy Lichtenstein
-Claes Oldenburg
-Robert Rauschenberg
-Andy Warhol
-Tom Wesselmann
British Pop Art
The word ‘POP’ was first coined in 1954, by the British art critic Lawrence Alloway, to describe a new type of art that was inspired by the imagery of popular culture. The most famous artists were Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi.
American Pop Art
Pop art in America evolved in a slightly differently way to its British counterpart. American Pop Art was both a development of and a reaction against Abstract Expressionist painting. The forerunners of American Pop Art were Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.
Let’s talk about Surrealism, the surrealist movement started in Europe in the 1920’s, after World War I with its nucleus in Paris. Its roots were influenced by the Dadaism, but it was less violent and more artistically based.
Surrealism was first the work of poets and writers. The French poet, André Brenton, is known as the “Pope of Surrealism.” Brenton wrote the Surrealist Manifesto to describe how he wanted to combine the conscious and subconscious into a new “absolute reality” (de la Croix 708). He first used the word surrealism to describe work found to be a “fusion of elements of fantasy with elements of the modern world to form a kind of superior reality.” He also described it as “spontaneous writing”. Soon surrealist ideas were given new life and became an influence over young artists in the United Sates and Mexico. The ideas of Surrealism were bold and new to the art world.
Iconic artists of the movement:
-Salvador Dalí
-Max Ernst
-René Magritte
-Man Ray
Lowbrow art, describes an underground visual art movement that arose in the Los Angeles, California, area in the late 1970s. It is a populist art movement with its cultural roots in underground comix, punk music, and hot-rod cultures of the street. It is also often known by the name pop surrealism. Lowbrow art often has a sense of humor – sometimes the humor is gleeful, sometimes impish, and sometimes it is a sarcastic comment.
Lowbrow is also commonly referred to as pop surrealism. The term «pop surrealism» was coined by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum for its 1998 exhibit of the same name.
Surrealism mines dreams and the unconscious, while popular culture is concerned with surface and commonplaces. But in recent years they have been brought together in exhibitions concerned with proving that High and Low are related.»Kirsten Anderson, who edited a second book called Pop Surrealism, considers lowbrow and pop surrealism to be related but distinct movements. However, Matt Dukes Jordan, author of Weirdo Deluxe, views the terms as interchangeable.
CAROLINA BO 