Pop Art

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Although Pop Art is most often associated with New York and Andy Warhol, its roots are usually traced several years earlier to London. In the early 1950s, a loose circle of artists, architects and critics calling themselves the Independent Group began meeting to discuss a subject most serious art institutions of the time ignored, American consumer culture: Hollywood films, advertising, science fiction magazines and product design, much of it encountered secondhand through imported magazines rather than direct experience. Richard Hamilton and the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi were central figures, with Paolozzi showing collages built from American advertising imagery as early as 1952. The group's ideas reached the public in 1956 with This Is Tomorrow, a landmark exhibition at London's Whitechapel Gallery, for which Hamilton created the small collage Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing, now widely regarded as one of the founding images of Pop Art. Built from clippings of a bodybuilder, a pin-up, a television, a vacuum cleaner and a canned ham label, the collage compressed the promises and absurdities of postwar consumer advertising into a single domestic scene. The following year, in a letter dated 16 January 1957 to the architects Alison and Peter Smithson, Hamilton set down what remains the movement's most quoted definition, describing the art he had in mind as: Popular (designed for a mass audience), Transient (short-term solution), Expendable (easily forgotten), Low cost, Mass produced, Young (aimed at youth), Witty, Sexy, Gimmicky, Glamorous, and Big business. Because Hamilton and the Independent Group were examining American imagery from a distance rather than living inside it, British Pop tended toward a more analytical, ironic treatment of consumer culture than the American movement that would soon eclipse it in fame, which is why Hamilton is often called the intellectual father of Pop even though his work remains far less widely known than Warhol's.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

When Pop Art crossed the Atlantic in the late 1950s and took hold in New York in the early 1960s, it changed character. Where British artists like Richard Hamilton had studied American consumer imagery from a distance, American Pop artists were immersed in the culture they painted, and their work took on a harder, more direct edge, borrowing the flat colors, sharp outlines and mechanical repetition of commercial printing rather than Hamilton's collage aesthetic. Andy Warhol, a successful commercial illustrator before he turned to fine art, became the movement's central figure. In 1962, Warhol exhibited paintings of Campbell's Soup Cans, thirty two canvases depicting each variety of the product with the flat, impersonal precision of an advertisement, followed soon after by repeated silkscreen images of Coca Cola bottles, Brillo boxes and, increasingly, celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley. By using the silkscreen process to produce near-identical multiples of a single image, Warhol made the mechanics of mass production part of the artwork's meaning rather than something to be hidden. Roy Lichtenstein pursued a parallel strategy in paint, enlarging individual panels from mass-market comic books, complete with their Ben-Day dot printing patterns and melodramatic captions, into monumental canvases that forced viewers to notice conventions of commercial image-making they would otherwise overlook. Both artists, along with contemporaries such as James Rosenquist and Claes Oldenburg, worked from the conviction that the imagery of supermarkets, comic strips and advertising billboards was as legitimate a subject for serious painting and sculpture as any inherited from the history of art, a position that directly challenged the seriousness and gestural interiority of the Abstract Expressionist painting that had dominated the previous decade. Because this American phase produced the movement's most famous and widely reproduced images, it is American Pop, rather than Hamilton's earlier British version, that most popular accounts credit as the beginning of Pop Art, even though the label and the underlying idea were both first articulated in London several years earlier.