Pop Art

The period between 1949 and 1951, Francis Bacon, a British painter, began to use photographs inhis paintings. This is suggested as an initial move in thedirection of Pop Art in England. In the period, Francis Bacon painted a series of screaming heads which were partially referenced from a still from the film Battleship Potemkin by Sergei Eisenstein. The still which inspired Bacon was an image of panic of a nurse wounded in the eye with broken pince-nez (Fig. 1). The painting Head Vi (Fig. 2) by Francis Bacon well exemplifies a reference from the still. Bacon continued to reference other photographicsources in his later works. Although other painters used mass-media references before Bacon, Bacon’s use of it was different from others. The quotation and partial transformation in the use of photographic source is central to later development in Pop Art (Lippard, 1966).   It is now a fact that a group called the Independent Group is responsible for the development of British Pop Art. The Independent Group was a small and informal organisation, set up within the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. It consisted of artists, architects and writers including Eduardo Paolozzi, Alison and Peter Smithson, Richard Hamilton, Peter Reyner Banham and Lawrence Alloway. When they convened in 1954, they brought up the theme of popular culture. Lawrence Alloway, who was a member of the group, stated “One result of our discussions was to take Pop culture out of the realm of ‘escapism’, ‘sheer entertainment’, ‘relaxation’, and to treat it with the seriousness of art” (Alloway,1966 as cited in Lippard, 1966, p. 32) in his essay. Today, this is generally known as the origin of British Pop Art.