Pop Art, Modern Art Popular With Today's Collectors

By Author: Vikram Kumar
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Savvy art collectors, along with those who'd like an interesting print or two for their homes, tend these days toward works from two successive periods: Modern Art and Pop Art.

Many people esteem works of Modern Art without realizing it, since the movement's roots began in the late 19th century with the art of such now-famous artists as Paul Cezanne, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse Lautrec and Vincent van Gogh. Their love of experimentation encompassed both fresh ways of seeing - think of van Gogh's "Starry Night" for instance - along with new and sometimes shocking ideas about art's function and the nature of art materials.

In the early 20th century, Henri Matisse and his contemporaries such as Andrew Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck continued the Modern Art movement with multi-colored and expressive landscapes and figurative paintings that electrified the Paris artistic world. In particular Matisse, with paintings such as his two different versions of "The Dance," reflected the movement's tendency toward abstraction. Rather than the highly realistic paintings of their predecessors, Modern artists ...
... painted emotional responses to what they saw, using bold combinations of colors, rhythmic repetition and symbols of almost hedonistic human liberation.

Perhaps one of the most famous artists of the Modern Art period of was Pablo Picasso. Influenced early on by Gauguin and Toulouse Lautrec, Picasso later began experimenting with an idea promoted by Cezanne, that all of nature can be shown using three geometric forms: spheres, cones and cubes. Picasso's work, "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," completed in 1907, was a radical creation. Not only did Picasso show five prostitutes in a brothel, they were painted violently, looking more like primitive tribal masks than humans. His innovation led to the development of a form of Modern Art known as Cubism.

Art historians deem that the period of Modern Art continued through the 1970s, although by then it had been succeeded by a movement that was the antithesis of Modern sensibilities: Pop Art.

Pop Art emerged in the 1950s in the United Kingdom as a reaction to the abstracts of Modern Art, which by then had gained expression in the works of groundbreaking artists such as Jackson Pollack. The movement crossed the Atlantic to the United States in the 1960s, fueled in part by the growth of the psychedelic era. In fact, it's difficult to tell which movement influenced the other: the use of psychedelic drugs that induced visions in wild colors or the art that depicted ordinary objects in visionary settings.

Pop Art's philosophy, as a rejection of emotional abstraction, portrayed everyday objects but with commercial art techniques. Part of Pop Art's allure to the Swingin' Sixties was the way it attempted to capture popular culture and mass media. In their own way, Pop Art painters both rejected and employed the legacies of Modern Art. The paintings were of realistic things and pop culture icons - think of Andy Warhol's soup cans and Marilyn Monroe - but they turned them into satirical commentaries on the consumerism of art collectors and museum collections. In addition to Warhol, Pop Art's artists included David Hockney, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Peter Max, Claes Oldenburg and Robert Rauschenberg, among others.

Ironically, in the end the very innovations that Pop Art employed as a rejection of Modern Art philosophies made Pop Art works as highly sought after by art patrons as their Modern Art predecessors.

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Whether a patron's taste runs to the abstract expressionism of Modern Art or to the psychedelic realism of Pop Art , Artboom features works from both schools and more for discriminating collectors.