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 loud, 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.
Here is what I think most people miss: 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: saturated flat color, hard edges, irony, images borrowed and repeated.
The targets: the seriousness of abstract modern art and the snobbery of âhighâ culture.
The stars: Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Hamilton, David Hockney.
What does Pop art mean?
âPopâ is short for popular, as in popular culture.
The British critic Lawrence Alloway is usually credited with the term in the mid 1950s, for art drawn from the mass produced, commercial world. It described painting that took its imagery straight from popular culture: ads, packaging, the supermarket and the screen.
That was the radical move. For the first time, the âlowâ 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.
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 its opposite: impersonal, borrowed, mechanical and funny, where Abstract Expressionism had been soulful, original and 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.
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, graphic and deadpan. Warholâs soup cans, Lichtensteinâs 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.
Warhol, Lichtenstein, Hamilton, Hockney
Four artists define pop. Here are the four I would put first, and why.
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, printing dots and all, into huge precise paintings like Whaam!. High art doing its best impression of a throwaway cartoon.
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 hides a quiet secret.
Pop art basically built the modern image world
Pop art did more than predict today's visual culture. It became that culture.
Advertising and branding. Loud color, repeated icons, celebrity faces. Pop artâs playbook is now every brandâs 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 âis a soup can art?â won so completely that the question now sounds quaint. The supermarket did become the museum.
Where to see Pop art loud and life size
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. Warholâs Campbellâs 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, straight answers
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 brash, 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 âlow,â commercial imagery as worthy of fine art, which outraged traditional critics.
What is the most famous Pop artwork? Andy Warholâs Campbellâs Soup Cans and Marilyn Diptych, and Roy Lichtensteinâs Whaam!.
Did Pop art begin in Britain or America? It started in mid 1950s Britain with artists like Richard Hamilton, then exploded in early 1960s New York with Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, who made it world famous.
The mirror it held up
I used to dismiss pop art as shallow. Cartoons and soup cans, where was the depth?
But pop saw something true, and a little frightening, before anyone else.
It understood that people no longer live mainly among nature, or even among each other. They 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 showed the image saturated world that was taking over.
That is why it still feels current. The world is more flooded with mass images than ever, and pop art was the first movement to take that seriously, by pretending not to.
The market eventually settled the argument. In 2022 a single Warhol silkscreen of Marilyn Monroe sold for 195 million dollars, the highest price ever paid at auction for an American artwork.
The soup can won.
