Pop Art Movement

Pop Art was an influential contemporary art movement in Western art history which emerged in the early 1950s in Britain and extended to America by the late 1950s where it strongly flourished. It was a style of art that duplicated objects or scenes from mundane life through inspiration from the elements of commercial art and substances of mass culture and media (such as comic strips and brand name packaging). Pop Art commented on modern society and culture, mainly consumerism by incorporating and characterising popular icons which were displayed with a combination of humour, criticism and irony. Pop Art initially began as an opposed reaction to the constraints of Abstract Expressionism but later evolved into the new favourable movement called Photorealism.

Abstract Expressionism was a modern art movement in America that appeared in New York City following World War II and thrived in the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s. Its development was determined by the migration of countless avant-garde European artists to New York in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Abstract Expressionism is often referred to as New York School and was the first school in American painting to announce its liberty from European styles and to influence the progression of art overseas. It is a type of non-representational, subjective art in which the artist expresses themself entirely through the utilisation of form and colour devoid of any present solid objects. The movement encompassed many techniques but shared several characteristics such as the artworks were typically abstract and portrayed structures that were not located in the natural world; they accentuated emotional expression and skill; they exhibited a solitary unified subject in shapeless space; and the canvases were large to amplify the visual result and illustrate authority. Abstract Expressionists rejected the social realism, regionalism and geometric concept which were accepted by the 1930s American painters. During the 1950s, the...