Pop, Minimalism and Conceptual Art

Advertising, comics and consumerism became art, while Minimalists and Conceptual artists stripped away everything but the idea and the form.

Around 1960 young artists in New York began to react against the seriousness of the Abstract Expressionists. Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns brought everyday objects, flags and targets into their work. Soon Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg went further: they made art out of soup cans, comic strips and hamburgers. Pop Art was born.

At the same time, other artists went in the opposite direction. The Minimalists Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre and Agnes Martin worked with simple geometric forms, industrial materials and series. The work was to be what it was and nothing else. Conceptual artists such as Sol LeWitt and Lawrence Weiner held that the idea mattered more than the finished object.

In the 1970s many artists left the gallery altogether. Robert Smithson built Spiral Jetty out of rock in the Great Salt Lake, and performance art, video art and feminist art emerged. Women artists such as Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro questioned who had been given a place in art history.

• Warhol and the soup cans
• Claes Oldenburg from Stockholm
• Spiral Jetty