Pop art is the art movement that took its images from advertising, comic strips, product packaging and film stars, and turned them into paintings, prints and sculptures.
It was born in Britain in the mid-1950s, reached the United States at the end of that decade and flourished in the 1960s. Its best-known names are Richard Hamilton in London, and Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein in New York.
Its artists believed that the pictures people saw every day, in shops, newspapers and cinemas, deserved the attention art had given to saints, kings and landscapes.
They kept the look of those pictures too. A Pop soup can has the flat colors and hard outlines of the printed label, as if the artist had copied it instead of interpreting it.
Many critics of the day were appalled. For them, ads and comics were beneath serious art, and these artists had not only picked such low subjects but refused even to criticize them.
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To see what was new, it helps to look at an older picture of the city. In 1928, the American Charles Demuth painted I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold, after a poem by his friend William Carlos Williams. In the poem, a red fire truck marked with a gold 5 roars through the rain and the city lights.
Demuth kept the gold 5 but broke it apart. The number repeats, smaller and smaller, among red planes and slanting beams of light, in the splintered manner of modern painting, and the truck almost disappears. Pop artists, by contrast, usually left their sources easy to recognize, and sometimes almost unchanged.
The name of the movement is older than the movement itself. In 1947, the British artist Eduardo Paolozzi made a collage on the cover of an American pulp magazine, one of the cheap fiction magazines of the day, where a pin-up smiles at the reader.
Paolozzi pasted in a hand holding a cartoon pistol aimed at her head. From the barrel bursts a puff of white smoke with a single word in it: POP! The collage is now in the collection of the Tate, Britain's national art collection in London.
A few years later, Paolozzi was part of the Independent Group, a small circle of young artists and critics who met at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, a center for modern art in London. They studied advertising, magazines and Hollywood films as closely as other people studied museum art.
What held them together was a shared feeling that the art taught in schools and shown in museums had little to do with the life they lived.
A name with two possible fathers
In their meetings, the little word from Paolozzi's collage grew into the name of a whole art. Two men of the group have been credited with that step, and the accounts do not agree.
What You'll Discover
What Hamilton's list said Pop art should be.
What American Pop was reacting against.
Where Warhol's soup cans were first shown.
How Lichtenstein painted printing dots by hand.
Why Pop art did not stay in New York.