What Is Pop Art? The Art Lover's Guide

Pop art is the movement that pulled soup cans, comic strips, ads and movie stars into the gallery, turning the throwaway images of mass culture into bold, ironic, instantly readable art. It made the everyday into icons.

It exploded in Britain and America in the 1950s and 60s, and it scandalized the art world.

Now the part nobody tells you.

Pop art was a rebellion disguised as a celebration.

On the surface it looks like a cheerful party of cartoons and consumer goods. Underneath, it was a deliberate slap at everything serious art stood for. After decades of brooding, soul searching abstraction, young artists said: enough. Real life is not a void of deep feelings. It is billboards, comics, packaging and TV. So they painted that, with a straight face, and let you wonder whether they were worshipping consumer culture or mocking it. The answer is both.

Pop art in one minute:

• The sources: advertising, comics, packaging, celebrities, mass media.

• The time: mid 1950s in Britain, late 1950s and 60s in America.

• The look: bold flat color, hard edges, irony, images borrowed and repeated.

• The targets: the seriousness of abstract modern art and the snobbery of “high” culture.

• The stars: Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Hamilton, David Hockney.

What does Pop art mean?

“Pop” is short for popular, as in popular culture.

The British critic Lawrence Alloway is usually credited with the term in the mid 1950s, to describe art drawn from the mass produced, commercial world. Tate’s definition of pop art traces it to art made in America and Britain that took its imagery straight from popular and commercial culture.

That was the radical move. For the first time, the “low” images everyone saw every day, a soup label, a comic panel, a movie still, were treated as worthy subjects for serious art. The gap between the museum and the supermarket collapsed.

Why Pop art was such a provocation

To understand the shock, you have to know what came before.

🖼️ IMAGE : Andy Warhol, Campbell’s Soup Cans

The dominant art of the 1950s was Abstract Expressionism: huge, brooding, deeply personal abstract canvases meant to express the artist’s inner soul. It was serious, heroic and humorless.

Pop art was the opposite in every way. Impersonal instead of soulful. Borrowed instead of original. Mechanical instead of emotional. Funny instead of solemn. Warhol even used silkscreen printing to remove the artist’s hand entirely, and said he wanted to be a machine.

To the old guard, this was vandalism. To everyone else, it was a thrilling jolt of the real world. Critics now see it as one of the first sparks of postmodernism.

Pop closed the great line of modern movements that ran from Cubism through Surrealism, and turned away from all their inwardness toward the loud, shared world of products and ads.

🖼️ IMAGE : Richard Hamilton, Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different?

American pop vs British pop

People lump them together. They came from opposite places.

• American pop lived inside consumer culture and reflected it back, slick, bold and deadpan. Warhol’s soup cans, Lichtenstein’s comics.

• British pop looked at American consumer culture from across the ocean, with more distance, irony and analysis. Hamilton, Paolozzi and the Independent Group.

The sentence to keep: American pop swims in the culture, British pop studies it from the shore.

4 Pop artists to know

Wikipedia gives you a list. Here are the four who define it, and why. My own picks.

🖼️ IMAGE : Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych

1. Andy Warhol. The icon of icons. Soup cans, Marilyn, Elvis, all silkscreened, repeated, drained of feeling and somehow more haunting for it. He turned fame and product into the same glittering, empty surface.

2. Roy Lichtenstein. The comic book master. He blew up panels from cheap comics, complete with the printing dots, into huge precise paintings like Whaam!. High art doing its best impression of a throwaway cartoon. Tate, which holds Whaam!, traces his whole career under Roy Lichtenstein.

🖼️ IMAGE : David Hockney, A Bigger Splash

🖼️ IMAGE : Claes Oldenburg, giant soft sculpture

3. Richard Hamilton. The British founder, who literally listed what pop art should be (popular, transient, expendable, low cost, mass produced, witty, sexy, glamorous, big business).

4. David Hockney. The pool painter. His sun drenched California scenes brought a personal, sensual warmth to pop. His most famous pool holds a secret I told here: David Hockney’s pool.

Pop art basically built the modern image world

Here is what the textbooks skip: pop art did not just predict our visual culture. It is our visual culture.

• Advertising and branding. Bold color, repeated icons, celebrity faces. Pop art’s playbook is now every brand’s playbook.

• Streetwear and merch. Warhol on a t shirt, comic dots on a hoodie. The look is endless.

• Memes. Borrowing a mass image, repeating it, twisting it with irony, is the exact logic Warhol and Lichtenstein invented.

So the movement that asked “is a soup can art?” won so completely that the question now sounds quaint. The supermarket did become the museum.

See it yourself: where to find Pop art

Go see how big and bright it really is.

• Tate Modern, London. Warhol, Lichtenstein, Hamilton and the British roots.

• The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans and Marilyn.

• The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. The largest collection devoted to a single American artist.

• The Whitney, New York. American pop in its home city.

Pop art FAQ

• What is Pop art in simple terms? An art movement of the 1950s and 60s that took its imagery from popular culture, ads, comics, packaging and celebrities, and made it into bold, ironic art.

• Who started Pop art? It began in Britain with artists like Richard Hamilton, and exploded in America with Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.

• Why was Pop art controversial? It rejected the seriousness of abstract art and treated “low,” commercial imagery as worthy of fine art, which outraged traditional critics.

• What is the most famous Pop artwork? Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans and Marilyn Diptych, and Roy Lichtenstein’s Whaam!.

The thing Pop art really understood

Step back for a second.

It is easy to dismiss pop art as shallow. Cartoons and soup cans, where is the depth.

But pop saw something true and a little frightening before anyone else. It understood that we no longer live mainly among nature or even among people. We live among images: ads, logos, screens, famous faces repeated until they mean nothing and everything. Pop did not hide from that. It held up a mirror, in bright flat color, and let us see the world of images we had built.

That is why it still feels so current. We are more surrounded by mass images than ever, and pop art is the movement that first took that seriously, by pretending not to.

Pop art did not lower itself to the supermarket.

It noticed the supermarket had already become our culture, and dared to paint it.