Psychedelia-60's

Psychedelic 60s

Psychedelia and the Psychedelic movement-1960-1975

Psychedelic:

   -Pertaining to or characterized by hallucinations, distortions of perception and awareness, and sometimes psychotic-like behavior.

-A drug that produces such effects.

-An art style influenced by the prevalence of hallucinatory drugs, especially LSD, with typical designs featuring abstract swirls of intense color with curvilinear calligraphy reminiscent of Art Nouveau.

The psychedelic movement began in the mid 1960’s and had an effect, not just on music, but also on many aspects of popular culture. This included style of dress, language and the way people spoke, art, literature and philosophy.

The name “psychedelic” refers to drugs that were popular with the youth culture of the time. Posters for rock concerts tried to visually express the feeling of tripping out.

The visual motifs of psychedelic art include Art Nouveau-inspired curvilinear shapes, illegible hand-drawn type, and intense optical colour vibration inspired by the pop art movement.

Background

The end of WWII in 1945 brought about a post-war economic boom in the U.S. It also brought about an enormous spike in the birth rate, known as “the baby boom.” Between 1945 and 1957 nearly 76 million babies were born in America. By the middle 1960s, most of these kids were young adults.

As young people do, these “baby boomers” questioned America’s materialism and conservative cultural and political norms. During the 1960s a youth movement emerged, seeking to create an egalitarian society free from discrimination. The feminist movement and the Black movement are a direct result of this evolution.

Americans in the 1960s and 70s addressed many controversial issues — from civil rights, the Vietnam War, nuclear proliferation, and the environment to drug use, sexual freedom, and nonconformity. Many youth sought spiritual experiences through Eastern Mysticism and psychedelic drugs.

Music festivals and concerts were a prominent feature of the 60s landscape, and musicians such as Jimi Hendrix, The Grateful Dead, The Who, Janice Joplin were the super-stars of the day. It’s hard to say whether psychedelic music influenced the counterculture or vice versa. But a unique art form found expression in band posters.

Influential Designers

-Wes Wilson

-Victor Moscoso

The Influence of  Op Art  & Pop Art

Op art, short for Optical art, is a style of abstraction that relies on geometric shapes, lines, and colour juxtapositions to create optical illusions for the viewer. Gaining popularity in the 1960s, such art often features patterns, grids, and effects like curving or diminishing objects. The Op art movement was driven by artists who were interested in investigating various perceptual effects.

“Pop” was a term first applied to popular culture rather than to art, but it would be one of the goals of the Pop art movement to blur the boundaries between ‘high’ art and ‘low’ popular culture.

Pop Art was one of the United States’ major artistic movements of the 20th century. It actually was first coined in Britain in 1955 but unsurprisingly the Americans took up the consumerist cause with much greater effect and conviction, and became the pioneers of the movement. Pop art and pop culture refers to the products of the mass media evolving in the late 1950s and 60s and also to the works of art that draw upon popular culture: packaging, television, advertisements, comic books, the cinema. Pop art attempted to break down the barriers between high (old-fashioned) art and contemporary culture.

Pop Art emphasized the kitschy elements of popular culture as a protest against the elitist art culture and the seriousness that surrounded it. It marked a return to sharp paintwork and representational art. It glorified unappreciated objects and ordinary business. In doing so, it aimed to make art more meaningful for everyday people and came to target a broad audience. Although it gained many supporters for the way it was easy to comprehend, critics saw pop art as vulgar.

Pop Art made its way to the United States in the 1960s with the help of ground-breakers Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.

Roy Lichtenstein became a household name for the way he used stencil-like dots, thick lines, bold colors, and thought bubbles to represent the comic book style. His paintings were the size of billboards.

Andy Warhol became the most famous American pop artist when he used an industrial silkscreen process to paint such commercial objects as Campbell’s soup cans and Coca-cola bottles and for portraying major celebrities like Liz Taylor, Jackie Kennedy, and Marilyn Monroe. As Warhol and Lichtenstein brought together elements of sign painting, commercial art and literary imagery in their work, they became renowned for erasing the boundaries between popular and high culture.