Pop Art: What Is It? Warhol, Lichtenstein and Key Works

Pop Art is an art movement of the 1950s and 1960s that takes its subjects from advertising, comic books, film and consumer goods. The artists blurred the line between high and low culture and often used techniques from the printing industry, such as screen printing and halftone dots.

Facts

From London to New York

Pop Art began in Britain. A group called the Independent Group met in London in the early 1950s to discuss advertising, science fiction and American mass culture. In 1956 the artist Richard Hamilton made the collage Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?, often called the first Pop Art work: a living room full of appliances, a bodybuilder and a tin of ham. The word pop is associated with the British critic Lawrence Alloway, and from the start it referred to images from popular mass culture rather than to a painting style.

In the United States the groundwork was laid by artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, who mixed everyday objects with painting. They in turn had learned from Marcel Duchamp and his Fountain. In the 1960s New York became the centre of Pop Art.

Warhol and Lichtenstein

Andy Warhol had worked as a commercial illustrator and understood how images sell. His Campbell’s Soup Cans of 1962, thirty-two canvases each showing a different soup, were first shown in Los Angeles and turned a can of tomato soup into art. He then set up the studio The Factory in New York and made screen prints of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Coca-Cola bottles, often in series to show how mass production drains an image of its individuality. In an interview in 1963 he said that he wanted to be a machine, a remark often quoted to sum up his indifferent attitude to originality and the mark of the hand.

Roy Lichtenstein enlarged panels from comic books into gigantic paintings and imitated their halftone dots by hand. Works such as Whaam! of 1963 take their subject from a war comic but turn it into a cool study of how emotion and action are expressed with line and fields of colour.

Pop across the Atlantic and in the Nordic countries

In Britain David Hockney went on with sunlit swimming pools and Peter Blake with collage; in 1967 Blake designed, together with Jann Haworth, the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Claes Oldenburg, born in Stockholm in 1929, made soft sculptures of hamburgers and telephones and became known for his gigantic objects.

In Sweden Öyvind Fahlström is counted as an early innovator. His map-like, game-like pictures filled with cartoon figures mix politics, popular culture and play, and his art was shown at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, which was early in showing contemporary American art.

What Pop Art wanted and what it left behind

Critics have long debated whether Pop Art celebrates consumer society or criticises it. It probably does both: it likes the surfaces and colours but also shows how everything is turned into goods. By taking its subjects from advertising it also killed off the idea of the lone genius and the large, serious painting that modernism had praised.

The legacy can be seen in later artists such as Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami and Yayoi Kusama, whose dots and pumpkins are sold as pictures and as things. Pop has also coloured graphic design, posters and fashion; see also the posters in the design section. It belongs to the art of the post-war period and leads on to the present day.

How to recognise it

Exercise

Which artist is known for screen prints of soup cans and Marilyn Monroe?