Art Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words - 5

Art - Essay Example He had stated the same six years earlier, in his rather personal manifesto in the catalogue of his 1855 exhibition: To word, to make a living art, that is my aim.’ This is a very important idea that artists must contend with in the contemporary world since it’s the basis of pop art. Secondly, Pop Art was created in New York and London, and its view is on the very special world of the mid-twentieth-century metropolis. Unmistakably, Pop is rooted in the urban environment. Additionally, Pop looks at special aspects of that environment which because of their associations and cultural level seemed impossible as subjects of art. These included: comics and picture magazines, the world of popular entertainment, Hollywood movies, pop music and fairgrounds; consumer durables, foodstuffs and even money. Thirdly, pop artists treat this subject matter in a special manner. For instance, they insist that a soup can or comic strip is simply a ‘motif, an excuse for a painting, like an apple in a still-life by Cezanne. Roy Lichtenstein, for instance has said before that: ‘Once I am involved with the painting I think of it as an abstraction. Half the time, they are upside down anyway when I work.’ On the contrary, while in a Cezanne the motif is a familiar one, and it’s easy for the viewer to ignore it and focus on the formal qualities of the painting, in Pop Art this motif is by no means familiar and thus strongly engages the viewer’s attention (Rubin 162). Not only is the motif new, its presentation was startlingly literal and looked more like the real thing than ever before in art’s history. The outcome was a kind of art combining the abstract and the figurative in a new way. It was realism, though done in the full knowledge of all that happened i n modern art since the time of Courbet. The next part of the discussion focuses on the major Pop artists, namely Roy