The end of the Second World War marked the beginning of the economic recovery from the devastation wrought by the conflict around the world. People's lives in Western Europe and the United States steadily improved during the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s. Economies recovered and then grew. Jobs were plentiful. Population was growing thanks to a baby boom. And in the art world, artists were experimenting with new themes and art forms.
In the 1960s people were on the move, and art reached for the masses with moving sculptures inspired from every day movements from the wind or mechanically delivered. Op Art also suggested a sense of movement, but through optical illusions. Pop Art emerged at the same time, with the goal of using everyday and highly recognizable objects as art, which allowed the artists to shift attention from the work of art itself to the way the artist worked. Art, they suggested, was an idea, and anything could be seen as artistic, even the most mundane objects.
Another trend that developed during the 1960s was Invisible Art, where art was not necessarily present and required the viewer to assume it existed even thought they could not see it, and therefore question reality itself. At the same time, reality itself became a representation in art, where subjects were shown as they truly were, and not as idealized versions of themselves. Art also became more engaged, with frequent mergers between art and performance, as Woodstock would reveal. Revolutions and demonstrations in the 1960s also triggered engaged art, art that carried a message.
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