Pop Art

Pop Art

Milton Glaser, one of the foremost of the Pop Art graphic designers made use of posters such as civil rights, womens’ movement. Environmentalism, and from these he produced funny and eclectic designs.

I heart NY, 1970

Seymour Schwast, another graphic designer of the Pop Art movement, was a co – founder of the push pin studio. This was a studio for graphic designer, founded by Milton Glaser, Reynold Ruffins, Edward Sorel and Seymour Schwast.

The images he produced were influenced mostly by primitive imagery.

End Bad Breath

His designs were also very playful and he offered an alternative to the swiss design which was very convenient at the time because the masses were getting bored of the same old boring rigid typefaces and layouts. In addition to moving away from the same old boring style, Schwast introduced illustration into his work also. He loved and appreciated the past and included many Victorian figurines and letter forms into his design. He also combined a lot of text and image to resemble German expressionists woodcut with primitive art colouring. Although I have mentioned that he copied the past, he did not copy it. He rather looked to the past and had a certain style of ‘adapt and adopt’.

Alphabet designs

Dante’s Divine comedy

Another great Pop Art Graphic Designer was Shigeo Fukuda.  He created posters with the barest minimum of components, with simplicity like that of logos, often satirical and always well and perfectly designed. Needless to say this is my favourite artist from this era. His work experiments with negative space and perspective, and inducing visual and geometric interplay between elements on the poster, often muddling the viewer with the induced depth and irregular visual planes. His trademark design evolved from Swiss graphic design and he also kept very true to Japanese prints and style. He used a very limited colour palette and obvious lines to create illusions. He passed away in 2009. He is described as “Japan’s consummate visual communicator.”

Although with all this happening in the United States and the majority of Pop Artists evolving there, we assume that it originated there, it actually originated in Great Britian, with the artwork; Just what it is that makes today’s homes so different so appealing.

With Pop Art there was a feeling of excess, of consumption and indulgence, and also of advertising sex. Pop artists took the idea that Art can be made from (as described by Marcel Duchamp) ready mades and continued to build upon it. Leading Pop artists who used this method were Andy Warhol and Richard Hamilton. Pop Art was also centered around the conceptual, the idea having more actual meaning than the artwork itself.

links:

http://degreeconcertina.tumblr.com/

http://www.aiga.org/medalist-seymourchwast/

http://www.creativebloq.com/art/pop-art-8133921