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US Style and design (20th century) – Pop Art, Commercial Photography (реферат)

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US Style and design (20th century) –

Pop Art, Commercial Photography

The twentieth century is the first century of self-conscious, total
design at every level of our living and environment. Care and vision in
application of design have come to be demanded in every aspect of modern
life – from our kitchens and bathrooms, to our factories and workshops,
from our clothes and domestic objects, to the packaging of pocket
calculators 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
line possessed by an image or artifact, in all essentials ‘design’ is an
industrial or post-industrial concept. With the introduction of
mass-production, the people who invented ideas for objects became
separated from the people who made them who, again, were separated from
the people who sold them. The industrial revolution also created the
concept of the market. Personal need, or the whims of a patron, were
replaced by a more abstract demand: the tastes of a large, amorphous
body of consumers.

The modern designer came into being as an intermediary between industry
and the consumer. His role was to adapt the products of industry to the
mass market, to make them more useful and durable, perhaps, but to make
them more appealing and commercially successful, certainly. Commercial
success is the touchstone of achievement in design, although designers
in different cultures have often taken different views as to how the
achievement is measured or the success validated.

So, design in business and advertisement means much. The story of style
in the applied arts since the mid-to late fifties has been dominated by
various new forces, including social and economic factors and certain
aspects of technical and scientific progress. Now we have computer
design, web design, advertisement design ( for example consumer-product
branding design) 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, a
high-powered business dedicated to the development effective marketing
techniques; it involved new design concepts and a whole new professional
jargon of product packaging, market research, corporate images and house
style.

The POP Art movement embraced the work of a new generation of artists of
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
other formalized 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 and injected
a new vigour into the applied arts. Pop and the art styles which were
its natural successors, notably American Hard-Edge Abstraction and the
Hyper- or Photo-realist school of around 1970, suggested a new palette o
colours and gave a fresh, ironical edge to the imagery of popular
culture. The Pop ethic posi lively encouraged designers to exploit
vulgarity brashness and bright colour, and to use synthetic or
disposable materials in contexts in which they would formerly have been
unacceptable. Pop has had a lasting effect on design in a wide variety
of media, including interiors, graphics and fashion.

Pop has spawned furniture in bright, primary-coloured plastics and in
boldly printed fold-away cardboard; it has inspired, notably in Britain
and Italy, witty sculptural furniture in brash, synthetic materials
reminiscent of the sculptures of Claes Oldenburg. The fashion and
furniture shop Mr Freedom, opened in London in 1969 by Tommy Roberts,
was a veritable shrine to the Pop cult, with lively furniture designs by
Jon Weallans. Italian Pop furniture was one aspect of the Italian design
community’s wide-ranging intellectual approach which, since the sixties,
has made Italy the most progressive country in many areas of the applied
arts.

The influence of Pop can be seen in graphic design in the sixties in the
work of the American Pushpin Studios, founded by Milton Glaser and
Seymour Chwast. Pop and the Hyper-Realists also inspired the slick
airbrush work of a number of graphic artists working in the seventies
and eighties, notably the British artists Philip Castle and Michael
English. Pop imagery is 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 the
late 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. POP
is everywhere, we see everyday objects and images of American popular
culture – Coca-Cola bottles, soup cans, sigarette packages and comic
strips.

Commercial photography

Commercial photographic images are a major ingredient of our visual
life, 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 polished images of a stylized, glamourized and idealized
view of the World in order to sell a product or a service.

The major categories of commercial photography are advertising in its
countless guises, including product photography and photo-illustration,
fashion, beauty and certain categories of photography which are neither
reportage nor aspire to be fine art, yet which can be fascinating social
documents of considerable aesthetic quality.

Irving Penn has continued to be a master in each of these genres and has
set standards to which many aspire. His career has spanned forty years,
during which his work, from his early fashion and still-life
compositions to current still-life product studies such as his series
for the cosmetics manufacturers Clinique, has shown an inimitable vision
and consistent aesthetic rigour.

Ben Stern, though far from being Penn’s artistic equal, became the
archetypal commercial photographer in the fifties and sixties, running a
vast studio in New York and showing considerable skill and versatility
in interpreting the briefs of art directors and clients.

In the sixties the profession of commercial and, in particular, fashion
photography became greatly glamourized: the successful young
photographer became a popular folk hero, as if the camera were a
passport to the illusory world which it could depict—Antonioni’s film
Blow-Up (1966-7) defined the role model. Among the most interesting
magazines to be launched in the sixties, the photography of which
captured the youthful excitement of that period, were the British Nova,
which commissioned some of the best fashion photography of its day, and
the German Twen, brilliantly art directed by Willy Fleckhaus.

In the sixties advertising played a secondary role to editorial
photography in magazines. Today the reverse seems true, for the
character of many magazines is dictated by the market needs of
advertisers and many photographers bemoan the greater restrictions this
imposes. The seventies and eighties have, nonetheless, brought forth a
new roll-call of talent. Outstanding contemporary figures include Helmut
Newton and Guy Bourdin, who have dominated the field of fashion
photography; Hans Feurer, Arthur Elgort, Denis Piel and others, a few of
the less celebrated but talented fashion 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
encouraged to aspire. They create glamourized images of women and give a
heightened visual appeal to the products which are economic mainstay of
our society, be it a hamburger, a perfume or an automobile.

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