Pop Art and Hippie Counterculture: 1960s Visual Revolution

Introduction: Youth Rebellion and the Counterculture Movement

The established order of postwar society produced a crowd of rebels who dreamed of changing the world from every possible angle. In response to this state of affairs, young people began to revolt against a world that seemed, from their perspective, to be falling apart. Revolutionary plans and ideals started to take shape in the minds of college students who complained chiefly against old structures that history had proven wrong.

This discontent gave rise to a counterculture movement that expressed itself as a wave of raging freedom, attempting to break down the conventional worldview of past generations. The new lifestyle manifested on every level and stage, dramatically changing the look and expression of society. From music and art to philosophy and dress fashion, the rising "flower children" wanted to create their own world governed entirely by their own rules.

The hippie culture dictated a radical change in behavior that contradicted the established system: men wore long hair, grew beards, and developed an inclination toward psychedelic colors. Women returned to a retro look of no make-up and loose, ragged clothing. People seemed to have traveled back in time, adopting the appearance and attitude of an ancient society, as if trying to build one anew. Their attitude defied common rules and encouraged formerly forbidden behaviors: they dropped out of school, lived in communities, traveled widely, and turned their backs on every form of institutionalized system.

This new generation stood against the repressions of past rigid standpoints that had encouraged resignation and acceptance of a fixed social pattern. Their new position advertised hedonism, freedom, and pleasure — ignoring the uncomfortable sides of existence, denying rules they disagreed with, and urging followers to take only what was most beautiful in life. This worldview promoted rebellion, spontaneity, and a determined rejection of convention. Their ideal of life was based on hedonism, meaning, literally, pleasure as a form of living.

The Hippie Lifestyle and Its Cultural Expression

Drugs were openly distributed, and their use became a common and popular habit. People who had spent a lifetime under restriction now claimed the freedom to do everything that had previously been forbidden. Tolerance toward different religions proliferated, and experimenting with new forms of spirituality became fashionable. Adherents drew inspiration from Native American rituals in which drugs were used for ceremonial purposes, using this precedent to justify their own practices.

All of these changes were reflected in the world of art, which has always served as a primary form of expression for humanity and culture. The first half of the twentieth century had been characterized by a succession of short-lived artistic currents that mirrored the rapidly changing world and acted as responses to its many conflicts and social rearrangements. The movements that most influenced the visual taste of the mid-twentieth century were Fauvism, Dadaism, and Surrealism — and, later, Abstract Expressionism, which emerged in the 1940s as a result of many European Surrealist artists relocating to New York during World War II. Their influence helped American artists discover the freedom of spontaneous creation and detach themselves from the conventional inclinations of earlier decades.

By the mid-twentieth century, the new consumer culture offered an ever-expanding market and an abundance of products to buy. Advertising became essential to sustain the mass-consumption lifestyle. As a consequence, people found themselves surrounded by ads — in magazines, newspapers, posters, and the rapidly expanding film industry — and the image played a vital role in public life. As a reply to the monochromatic world of early film and photography, the world of publicity — the new art of the purchasing public — became more colorful, cheerful, and bright.

In modern consumer society, every form of artistic expression was heavily influenced by the industrial and commercial lifestyle. By the mid-1950s, Pop Art was beginning to capture the public's interest. The term was first introduced by the critic Lawrence Alloway in 1954 to define work created by and for the advertising world — art that reflected the industrial or commercial side of life. It defined a kind of art conceived to be easily understood by the common everyday public, appearing as a direct reaction against Abstract Expressionism, which had moved so far from reality that many viewers found it inaccessible.

From Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art

Contrary to the abstract fashion, which refused a clear subject or easily identifiable message, Pop Art introduced an attempt to return to the objective reality that had been neglected in previous years. Its language was figurative and realistic. It portrayed trivial things: the customs, ideas, and appearance of the contemporary world, with its thematic borrowed from the urban environment. In this conception, the critical or philosophical message was absent; the image existed merely for its own sake. Pop Art used large scale and bold proportions to celebrate the potential of the industrial world. Its shapes and forms were flat, with no interest in perspective. Bright colors were drawn from those used in mass-market products. Pop Art took its major influences from the Dada style, Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades, and Kurt Schwitters's collages.

In this period, graphic expression developed into something less rigidly outlined than it had been in the early decades of the century. Colors became more emphatic and lines more flexible — drawing grew stylized, deformed, or simplified, representing a vague form of hallucination. Strong colors had been in vogue before, during the Fauvist period, but now returned to the local taste, following the growing psychedelia that was overtaking the public imagination. Free, flexible, and powerful lines, paired with determined and dramatic contrasting colors through a minimalist layout, symbolized a desire to erase everything that existed and start over — to establish a brand new design of humanity and a new order.

Graphic expression became highly symbolist, pseudo-abstract, and leaning toward the surreal. The use of hundreds of subtle shades was abandoned in favor of a limited palette of very strong, cheerful, violent, dramatic, and shocking contrasting colors.

Ironically, in a world where new ideas promoted peace and harmony, visual taste became rather sharp and aggressive — perhaps intending to express the inner fears that the counterculture's outward attitude pretended to ignore. The hippie world focused on the search for happiness to a near-selfish degree, ignoring the surrounding world and all its faults and dark shadows. Pleasure became the new fashion: dreaming, searching for tranquility and positive sensations, detaching oneself from reality. Graphic design pictured the new hedonist generation's point of view: cheerful colors reflected their pursuit of constant joy; the freedom of lines reflected the anti-academic spirit of a generation that rebelled against rigid social rules; and minimalist expression showed their denial of complexity, refusing to acknowledge the many complications of the world around them.