Home Art in the 1950s

Modern Art

• Modern art took a more tactile turn when artists began using unusual media and materials to create their originals in the '50s. Jasper Johns, a commercially trained artist who gave up his advertising career to join the modern art revolution, was typical of this decade's innovators. Using targets, flags, beer cans and other artifacts, Johns created masterpieces that were mass-produced by printers and hung on the walls of homes across America. As a matter of fact, Johns was one of the first modern artists to make torn paper collages, a technique that amateur artists quickly adopted.

Abstractionists

• Abstractionists stepped out from the shadows of the '40s to influence a wide range of artisans: sculptors, painters, watercolorists and multimedia artists. Abstractionists were attracted to the idea of reinterpreting all things familiar, so if you recall posters featuring the works of Kandinsky, Pollack, Rothko, Brancusi and Miro hanging from the walls of homes and offices, you know that objects and people were regularly morphed into geometric shapes. Reproductions of trendy, abstract artwork hanging in prestigious galleries regularly wound up on the living room, dining room and bedroom walls of American homes, relegating many a Norman Rockwell painting to attics and basements.

Surrealists

• If your first thought when reading the word "surrealist" is that of Dali's "Hanging Clocks," you need no introduction to this '50s art genre. "Hanging Clocks" became the go-to wall art -- in the form of large lithographs, of course -- for every forward thinker's home and office. Surrealism is the child born of a marriage between the avant-garde and Dada movements, so even if your eye isn't trained to look for them, it's not hard to identify the influences of '20s artists in both movements. In the '50s, no Jack Kerouac reader worth his salt would say no to the work of the enigmatic Rene Magritte, whose iconic, faceless man in a bowler hat still has art observers scratching their heads.

Pop Art

• Pop art rocketed from England to the U.S. -- sort of a cultural exchange that sent representative art of the likes of Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters to the U.S. in exchange for Elvis Presley music of the same era. Pop artists inspired commercial artists to turn their advertising, photography and other mass media into nouveau artworks with a twist. Thanks to lithography, you could acquire the work of any contemporary pop artist inexpensively, so it was possible to fill an entire apartment with framed Roy Lichtenstein graphics and Andy Warhol compositions on a really tight budget.