Pop Art

Pop Art emerged in the mid-1950s as artists on both sides of the Atlantic turned to the imagery of mass media, advertising, and consumer culture as legitimate subject matter for fine art. Its earliest stirrings came from the Independent Group, a circle of young artists, architects, and critics, including Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi, who began meeting in London around 1952 to discuss the aesthetics of mass culture; Paolozzi's 1947 collage I Was a Rich Man's Plaything, incorporating a Coca-Cola bottle and pulp-magazine imagery, is often cited as a proto-Pop work. Richard Hamilton's 1956 collage Just What Is It that Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?, shown at the 'This Is Tomorrow' exhibition, became an early emblem of the sensibility, and in 1957 Hamilton defined Pop art's qualities in a now-famous list: 'Popular, Transient, Expendable, Low cost, Mass produced, Young, Witty, Sexy, Gimmicky, Glamorous, Big business.' The movement developed in parallel in the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s, building on Neo-Dada precedents set by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. American Pop artists rejected the emotional gravity of Abstract Expressionism in favor of a cool, detached embrace of consumer imagery: Andy Warhol repeated mass-produced icons like Campbell's Soup cans and Marilyn Monroe using commercial screenprinting techniques, Roy Lichtenstein enlarged comic-book panels using hand-painted Ben-Day dots, and Claes Oldenburg turned everyday objects into oversized soft sculpture. James Rosenquist brought a billboard painter's scale to surreal juxtapositions of consumer products, while in Britain, Peter Blake, David Hockney, and Patrick Caulfield developed a more ironic, academic take on American imagery. By the 1960s Pop Art had become one of the dominant new movements in Western art, prized for its wit and its direct commentary on consumerism, celebrity, and mass production, before giving way to Conceptual art and Minimalism by the decade's end.