Селеменева А. ММА -91
US Style and design (20th century) -
Pop Art, Commercial Photography
The twentieth century is the first century of self-conscious, totaldesign at every level of our living and environment. Care and vision inapplication of design have come to be demanded in every aspect of modernlife - from our kitchens and bathrooms, to our factories and workshops,from our clothes and domestic objects, to the packaging of pocketcalculators or the structuring of plastic dining chairs.
Although the word has been used since at least the fifteenth century,when Italian writers spoke of 'disegno' in describing the quality of linepossessed by an image or artifact, in all essentials 'design' is anindustrial or post-industrial concept. With the introduction of mass -production, the people who invented ideas for objects became separated fromthe people who made them who, again, were separated from the people whosold them. The industrial revolution also created the concept of themarket. Personal need, or the whims of a patron, were replaced by a moreabstract demand: the tastes of a large, amorphous body of consumers.
The modern designer came into being as an intermediary between industryand the consumer. His role was to adapt the products of industry to themass market, to make them more useful and durable, perhaps, but to makethem more appealing and commercially successful, certainly. Commercialsuccess is the touchstone of achievement in design, although designers indifferent cultures have often taken different views as to how theachievement is measured or the success validated.
So, design in business and advertisement means much. The story of stylein the applied arts since the mid-to late fifties has been dominated byvarious new forces, including social and economic factors and certainaspects of technical and scientific progress. Now we have computer design,web design, advertisement design (for example consumer-product brandingdesign) and the whole fashion of different types of ad, colors and so on.
The late fifties saw the birth of advertising as we know it today, ahigh-powered business dedicated to the development effective marketingtechniques; it involved new design concepts and a whole new professionaljargon of product packaging, market research, corporate images and housestyle.
The POP Art movement embraced the work of a new generation of artistsof late fifties and early sixties of both sides of the Atlantic. In
Britain, in addition to the Independent Group, there were Peter Blake,
Allen Jones. In USA Jasper Johns, Tom Wesselman, Claes Oldenburg and otherformalized the language of product packaging, from beer cans to Campbell's
Soup tins of strip cartoons, fast food, advertising hoardings and pin-ups.
Pop Art at once reflected and glorified mass-market culture andinjected a new vigour into the applied arts. Pop and the art styles whichwere its natural successors, notably American Hard-Edge Abstraction and the
Hyper-or Photo-realist school of around 1970, suggested a new palette ocolours and gave a fresh, ironical edge to the imagery of popular culture.
The Pop ethic posi lively encouraged designers to exploit vulgaritybrashness and bright colour, and to use synthetic or disposable materialsin contexts in which they would formerly have been unacceptable. Pop hashad a lasting effect on design in a wide variety of media, includinginteriors, graphics and fashion.
Pop has spawned furniture in bright, primary-coloured plastics and inboldly printed fold-away cardboard; it has inspired, notably in Britain and
Italy, witty sculptural furniture in brash, synthetic materials reminiscentof the sculptures of Claes Oldenburg. The fashion and furniture shop Mr
Freedom, opened in London in 1969 by Tommy Roberts, was a veritable shrineto the Pop cult, with lively furniture designs by Jon Weallans. Italian Popfurniture was one aspect of the Italian design community's wide-rangingintellectual approach which, since the sixties, has made Italy the mostprogressive country in many areas of the applied arts.
The influence of Pop can be seen in graphic design in the sixties inthe work of the American Pushpin Studios, founded by Milton Glaser and
Seymour Chwast. Pop and the Hyper-Realists also inspired the slick airbrushwork of a number of graphic artists working in the seventies and eighties,notably the British artists Philip Castle and Michael English. Pop imageryis still, today, a part of the staple diet of graphic design.
Pop's most notable impact on the world of fashion was in London in thelate sixties and early seventies, and in Italy in the achievements of Elio
Fiorucciin the seventies. Fiorucci brought fun into fashion, and his shops,first in Milan and then internationally, became known for their Pop -inspired clothes and graphics.
And it's influence can be seen also and on a graphic design in USA. POPis everywhere, we see everyday objects and images of American popularculture - Coca-Cola bottles, soup cans, sigarette packages and comicstrips.
Commercial photography
Commercial photographic images are a major ingredient of our visuallife, assimilated from magazines, hoardings and such contexts as brochures,catalogues, calendars, packaging and point-of-sale promotional material.
Commercial photography thrives as a means of creating highly polishedimages of a stylized, glamourized and idealized view of the World in orderto sell a product or a service.
The major categories of commercial photography are advertising in itscountless guises, including product photography and photo-illustration,fashion, beauty and certain categories of photography which are neitherreportage nor aspire to be fine art, yet which can be fascinating socialdocuments of considerable aesthetic quality.
Irving Penn has continued to be a master in each of these genres andhas set standards to which many aspire. His career has spanned forty years,during which his work, from his early fashion and still-life compositionsto current still-life product studies such as his series for the cosmeticsmanufacturers Clinique, has shown an inimitable vision and consistentaesthetic rigour.
Ben Stern, though far from being Penn's artistic equal, became thearchetypal commercial photographer in the fifties and sixties, running avast studio in New York and showing considerable skill and versatility ininterpreting the briefs of art directors and clients.
In the sixties the profession of commercial and, in particular, fashionphotography became greatly glamourized: the successful young photographerbecame a popular folk hero, as if the camera were a passport to theillusory world which it could depict-Antonioni's film Blow-Up (1966-7)defined the role model. Among the most interesting magazines to be launchedin the sixties, the photography of which captured the youthful excitementof that period, were the British Nova, which commissioned some of the bestfashion photography of its day, and the German Twen, brilliantly artdirected by Willy Fleckhaus.
In the sixties advertising played a secondary role to editorialphotography in magazines. Today the reverse seems true, for the characterof many magazines is dictated by the market needs of advertisers and manyphotographers bemoan the greater restrictions this imposes. The seventiesand eighties have, nonetheless, brought forth a new roll-call of talent.
Outstanding contemporary figures include Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin, whohave dominated the field of fashion photography; Hans Feurer, Arthur
Elgort, Denis Piel and others, a few of the less celebrated but talentedfashion photographers; advertising and glamour photographers such as
Francis Giacobetti, James Baes ...
Commercial photographers play a great role in our consumer society,creating the images of a life-style to which we are constantly encouragedto aspire. They create glamourized images of women and give a heightenedvisual appeal to the products which are economic mainstay of our society,be it a hamburger, a perfume or an automobile.
