Famous pop art paintings took soup cans, comic strips and movie stars and put them on gallery walls at full scale. The artists behind them treated advertising and mass production as subjects worth painting seriously, and changed what counted as art in the process.
I have picked twelve pop art works worth knowing. All twelve are still under copyright, since the artists behind pop art worked well into the 20th and 21st centuries, so I am describing each painting in detail rather than showing it.
The movement pulled in a strange mix of people: a former billboard painter, a former shoe illustrator, and a sculptor who started out carving classical marble. All of them ended up painting the same everyday objects everyone else was already looking at.
In 30 seconds:
Pop art started in Britain in the mid 1950s, then took off in New York through the 1960s.
Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein turned supermarket products and comic book panels into some of the most recognized paintings of the century.
Every major pop art painting is still under copyright. Warhol died in 1987, Lichtenstein in 1997, and both estates manage their images closely.
The movement's roots go back further, to a 1956 collage by Richard Hamilton often called the first pop art work.
Museums like the Museum of Modern Art, Tate and the Art Institute of Chicago hold the best known paintings.
What pop art borrowed from advertising:
Flat, poster color. Painted the way a product label or an advertisement would be printed, not the way a canvas usually was.
Repetition. The same image copied across a grid, the way a product appears on a supermarket shelf.
Everyday subjects. Soup cans, comic strips, film stars and household objects, instead of myths or landscapes.
A step back from emotion. Many pop artists painted with a flat, mechanical hand on purpose, to mimic mass production rather than personal expression.
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1. Andy Warhol, Campbell's Soup Cans (1962)
Warhol painted all 32 varieties of Campbell's soup that existed at the time, one can per canvas, after a friend suggested he paint what he loved.
He had them shown lined up on a shelf like a grocery store display. The full set belongs to the Museum of Modern Art. I go deeper into his complete story.
2. Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych (1962)
Warhol made this only weeks after Marilyn Monroe's death, silkscreening the same publicity photo fifty times, half in fading color and half in black and white.
The right side grows paler toward the edge, like a signal running out. It hangs at Tate.
3. Roy Lichtenstein, Whaam! (1963)
Lichtenstein blew up a single panel from a war comic to nearly four meters wide, dots and all, showing a fighter jet firing a rocket into an enemy plane.
He painted the Ben Day dots by hand, using a homemade stencil, rather than printing them. It hangs at Tate. I go deeper into his complete story.
4. Roy Lichtenstein, Drowning Girl (1963)
A woman sinks beneath a stylized wave, a thought bubble above her reading that she would rather sink than call her boyfriend for help.
The source was a single panel from a DC romance comic, cropped and rewritten by Lichtenstein. It belongs to the Museum of Modern Art.
5. Richard Hamilton, Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? (1956)
Hamilton built this collage from magazine clippings for a London exhibition catalogue, packing a bodybuilder, a pin up model, a television and a canned ham into one cramped living room.
Art historians commonly point to it as the first true pop art work. It is held at the Kunsthalle Tübingen in Germany.
6. James Rosenquist, F 111 (1964 to 1965)
Rosenquist wrapped an entire room with a painting more than 3 meters tall and 26 meters long, mixing a fighter jet, a mushroom cloud shaped hairdryer and spaghetti into one continuous image.
He had worked as a billboard painter before turning to gallery painting, and it shows in the scale. It belongs to the Museum of Modern Art.
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7. Robert Rauschenberg, Retroactive I (1964)
Rauschenberg silkscreened a photograph of John F. Kennedy over painted brushstrokes and an image of an astronaut parachuting to earth, made the same year Kennedy was assassinated.
He had been combining photography and paint for years before pop art had a name. It hangs at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford.
8. Jasper Johns, Flag (1954 to 1955)
Johns painted an American flag so exact that people asked whether it counted as a flag or a painting of one, a question he said interested him more than the answer.
He built up the surface in encaustic, wax mixed with pigment, over layers of newspaper. It belongs to the Museum of Modern Art.
9. Tom Wesselmann, Still Life #30 (1963)
Wesselmann packed real product labels, a plastic flower and a framed reproduction of a Cézanne into one crowded canvas, blurring where the painting stops and the products begin.
He built an entire series of these still lifes through the 1960s. It belongs to the Museum of Modern Art.
10. Ed Ruscha, Standard Station (1966)
Ruscha painted a gas station at a sharp diagonal, its red Standard Oil sign floating above the pumps like a billboard against a flat sunset sky.
He had photographed dozens of real gas stations along Route 66 before painting this one from imagination. It belongs to the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth.
11. Peter Blake and Jann Haworth, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover (1967)
Blake and Haworth built a life size collage of cardboard cutouts, wax figures and flowers for the Beatles, packing in more than 70 faces from Marilyn Monroe to Karl Marx.
It counts as one of the most recognized pieces of pop art most people never think to call a painting. The original artwork stayed largely uncredited to the two artists for years despite its fame.
12. Eduardo Paolozzi, I Was a Rich Man's Plaything (1947)
Paolozzi built this small collage from American magazine clippings nearly a decade before Hamilton's more famous version, pairing a pin up girl with a gun shaped like the word POP.
It was the first time the word pop appeared inside a work of art. It belongs to Tate.
Short answers, pop art
What makes a painting pop art? It borrows its subjects and its visual language from advertising, comic books and mass production, then treats them with the seriousness usually reserved for fine art.
Who invented pop art? Historians usually point to the British artist Richard Hamilton and his 1956 collage, though Warhol and Lichtenstein made the movement famous in New York a few years later.
Why does Andy Warhol keep repeating the same image? Repetition mimics how mass produced goods and images actually work, the same product or photograph copied without end.
Is pop art American or British? Both. It started in London in the mid 1950s and became closely associated with New York after 1960.
Can I see pop art paintings for free? Tate in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York both hold major pop art collections, and Tate is free to enter.
Where to see them
Marilyn Diptych: Tate, London.
Whaam!: Tate, London.
Drowning Girl: Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Flag: Museum of Modern Art, New York.
F 111: Museum of Modern Art, New York.
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The word before the movement had one
The term pop art first appeared in print in 1958, in an essay by the British critic Lawrence Alloway, who used it to describe mass produced commercial imagery rather than any painting yet made.
Warhol did not go to art school to become a painter first. He spent the 1950s as a commercial illustrator, drawing shoe advertisements for a living, before he started painting soup cans.
Lichtenstein worked as a furniture and window display designer in the years right before Whaam!, a job that trained his hand to paint clean, flat commercial shapes at speed.
Warhol's Shot Sage Blue Marilyn sold for 195 million dollars at Christie's in 2022, the highest price ever paid at auction for a work by an American artist.