1950s
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The 1950s decade refers to the years 1950 to 1959 inclusive. The Fifties in the United States and much of Western Europe are generally considered conservative in contrast to the Social Revolution of the next decade. Mass suburban developments and nuclear family ideals serve as symbols of the era from the end of the Second World War in 1945 to the inauguration of United States President John F. Kennedy in 1961. Education grew explosively because of a very strong demand for high school and college education. The Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States played out through the entire decade. The fifties also revolutionized entertainment with the mainstream introduction of television, rapid growth of the recording industry and new genres of music, and movies targeted at teenage audiences. Due to the conservative norms of the era and the sometimes violent suppression of social movements, seeds of rebellion grew and were manifested through Rock and Roll, movies emphasizing rebelliousness, expansion of the Civil Rights Movement, the so-called Beat Generation of poets and artists. All of these played significant roles in the Social Revolution of the Sixties (1960s).
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In the West, an American generation traumatized by the Great Depression and World War II created a culture with emphasis on normality and conformity. Europeans took a generally different approach to a post-war society, aiming for a greater inclusiveness and social awareness after a global crisis in the preceding decades that many blamed on the failings of Free Market Capitalism, and the fifties were marked by the establishment of a Welfare State in many countries in western Europe.
Origins of rock and roll
Rock and roll emerged as a defined musical style in America in the 1950s, though elements of rock and roll can be seen in rhythm and blues records as far back as the 1920s. Early rock and roll combined elements of blues, boogie woogie, jazz and rhythm and blues, and is also influenced by traditional folk music, gospel music, and country and western.
Visual culture
Abstract expressionism, the first art movement specifically American to gain worldwide influence, was responsible for putting New York City in the centre on the artistic world, a place previously owned by Paris, France. This movement acquired its name for combining the German expressionism's emotional intensity with the anti-figurative aesthetic of the European abstract schools such as Futurism, Bauhaus and Synthetic Cubism. Jackson Pollock was one of the most influential painters of this movement, creating famous works such as No. 5, 1948.
Color Field painting and Hard-edge painting followed close on the heels of Abstract expressionism, and became the idiom for new abstraction in painting during the late 1950s. The term second generation was applied to many abstract artists who were related to but following different painterly directions than the earliest abstract expressionists. In the early 1950s Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning were enormously influential. However by the late 1950s Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko's paintings became more in focus to the next generation.
Pop art, with its roots in dadaism started to take form towards the end of the 1950s when some artists, after studying symbols and products of the world of propaganda in the United States, started to make them the main subject of their artistic work. That way, they used the most ostensive components of popular culture, with powerful influence in the daily life of the second half of the 20th century. It was the return of a figurative art, in opposition to the abstract expressionism that dominated the aesthetic scene since the end of World War II. Pop art used iconography of television, photography, comics, cinema and advertising. Andy Warhol was the most known artist of this movement, and in spite of it having initiated in the 50s, its most famous works date of the later decade.
Subcultures
Popular culture
- Brylcreem and other hair tonics had a period of popularity
- Juvenile delinquency was said to be at unprecedented epidemic proportions in the United States, though some see this era as relatively low in crime compared to today.
- Continuing poverty in some regions during recessions later on in this decade. The 1950s is often mistakenly painted as the pinnacle of American prosperity. To some, it also may be considered the peak of our modern American civilization The '50s were supposed to be a time of the "Affluent Society".
- The 1950s saw fairly high rates of unionization, government social spending, taxes, and the like in the United States and European countries,. Most Western governments were liberal or moderate, though domestic politics were also affected by reactions to communism and the Cold War.
- Optimistic visions of a semi-utopian technological future, including such devices as the flying car, were popular.
- The Day the Earth Stood Still hits movie theaters launching a cycle of Hollywood films in which Cold War fears are manifested through scenarios of alien invasion or mutation.
- Considerable racial tension arose with military and school desegregation in mostly the southern part of the United States, though major controversy and uproar did not truly erupt until the 1960s.
