ABSTRACT
After the restoration of peace on the European continent in 1945, artists turned their backs on figurative representation of reality. Abstract Expressionism, Art Informel, and Tachism became the dominant trends in the first postwar decade, assuming a position of virtual monopoly in Europe and the USA. In the mid-1950s a new development began to take shape-figurative paintings inspired by the new urban culture of the postwar period. What started off as a faint countertrend to high-modernist abstraction became a rising tide, for which Lawrence Alloway in 1958 coined the term “Pop Art” (1958:84-85). Artists as far afield as London, New York, Paris, Düsseldorf, and Milan turned toward a new form of realism without developing much of a group mentality or common program. Each possessed a recognizable, individual stance, yet all shared many concerns, which Henry Geldzahler defined at a symposium at the Museum of Modern Art in New York:
The new art draws on everyday objects and images. They are isolated from their ordinary context, and typified and intensified. What we are left with is a heightened awareness of the object and image, and of the context from which they have been ripped.
