Pop art
Ads, comics and celebrities as fine-art subjects: the mass-produced image
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How to recognise it
- Cans, bottles and product packaging
- Silkscreened grids of one face
- Halftone dots and comic-strip outlines
- Bright flat colours like commercial print
Why it emerged
The postwar consumer boom flooded daily life with advertising, television and packaging. Young artists in London and New York answered the solemnity of Abstract Expressionism by using what everybody already saw.
Examples
Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?1956 · Richard HamiltonA magazine-ad collage with a bodybuilder holding a 'POP' lollipop: often called the first Pop work
Campbell's Soup Cans1962 · Andy Warhol32 canvases, one per soup flavour: a supermarket product made into a museum subjectMarilyn Diptych1962 · Andy WarholFifty silkscreened Marilyns, vivid on the left and fading on the right: fame and death.jpg?width=640 "Eric Koch for Anefo · CC0 · Wikimedia Commons")
Whaam!1963 · Roy LichtensteinA war-comic panel blown up to four metres, Ben-Day dots and all, painted by hand
Campbell's Soup Cans1962 · Andy Warhol32 canvases, one per soup flavour: a supermarket product made into a museum subjectMarilyn Diptych1962 · Andy WarholFifty silkscreened Marilyns, vivid on the left and fading on the right: fame and deathWhaam!1963 · Roy LichtensteinA war-comic panel blown up to four metres, Ben-Day dots and all, painted by handMore in this style
- 1963 Drowning Girl — Roy Lichtenstein
How it spread
- 1956 London
- 1962 New York
- 1962 Los Angeles
- 1963 Düsseldorf
- 1972 Moscow (Sots Art)
Meanwhile elsewhere
- Modern architecture (International Style) Whole world
- Socialist realism Eastern Europe & Russia
- Abstract expressionism Americas
- Postmodernism Whole world