The 50s view the art highlights
The golden age of television. Elvis Presley and James Dean shake the world from the comfort of a post-war economic boom. The cold war heats up, and Sputnik heralds the start of the space race.
Much of the new art of the fifties in the West concentrated on the tangible, and veered away from the introspective focus of the abstract expressionists of the New York School in the 1940s - symbolized by Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still.
The new tangible style, which focused on the expressive qualities of the painted surface, was best represented by Pierre Soulages, Wols and Antoni Tąpies. Figurative imagery also underwent a revival, with Lucian Freud being the decade's most outstanding European exponent - as were Alex Katz and Philip Pearlstein in the US.
By the middle of the decade, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg foreshadowed the Pop Art of 1960s, with observers initially calling the irony and anti-art gestures of their work "neo-Dada". Johns, for example, used images in his art of "things the mind already knows" such as American flags, maps, targets, arabic numerals and the alphabet.
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