Description
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the United Kingdom and the United States during the mid-to late 1950s. The movement presented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular and mass culture - including advertising, comic strips, product packaging, celebrities, and everyday consumer goods - into painting, sculpture, and printmaking. By elevating the banal, the kitsch, and the mass-produced to the status of high art, pop art blurred the boundaries between high and low culture. It is also associated with the artists' use of mechanical means of reproduction or rendering techniques. In pop art, material is sometimes visually removed from its known context, isolated, or combined with unrelated material. Read more ↗
Key Artists
Andy Warhol
The undisputed icon of American Pop art who utilized mechanical silkscreen printing to replicate grocery shelf commodities, celebrity tragedies, and dollar bills, transforming the art studio into 'The Factory.'
Roy Lichtenstein
Master of hard-edged Pop art who elevated comic strip panels, melodramatic romance bubbles, and advertising graphics into monumental oil canvases meticulously rendered with hand-painted Ben-Day dots.
Richard Hamilton
British founding father of Pop art and Independent Group member who famously enumerated the defining traits of Pop art in 1957 as 'Popular, Transient, Expendable, Low cost, Mass produced, Young, Witty, Sexy, Gimmicky, Glamorous, and Big business.'
Claes Oldenburg
Sculptural genius of Pop art who opened 'The Store' in Lower Manhattan to sell plaster replicas of diner food before creating monumental soft sculptures of hamburgers, ice cream cones, and typewriters.
James Rosenquist
Former Times Square billboard painter who brought colossal scale, fragmented commercial imagery, and glossy advertising techniques to massive, room-engulfing Pop art canvases.
Tom Wesselmann
Key American Pop painter famous for his Great American Nude series, combining flat, faceless female silhouettes with real bathroom fixtures, television sets, and brand-name food labels.
Famous Artworks
Drowning Girl
Roy Lichtenstein · 1963
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York - Oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas
Gold Marilyn Monroe
Andy Warhol · 1962
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York - Silkscreen ink on synthetic polymer paint on canvas
Floor Burger
Claes Oldenburg · 1962
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto / MoMA collection history - Painted canvas filled with foam rubber and cardboard boxes
F-111
James Rosenquist · 1964
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York - Oil on canvas with aluminum, 23 panels
Fun Facts
When Roy Lichtenstein painted his famous Ben-Day dots - the uniform circles used by commercial printers to create shading in inexpensive comic books - he did not paint them freehand; instead, he pushed oil paint through perforated aluminum screens using a stiff dog brush.
↗ Source: moma.org
Andy Warhol called his Midtown Manhattan studio 'The Factory' because he wanted to demystify artistic creation into assembly-line production, famously remarking, 'The reason I'm painting this way is that I want to be a machine.'
↗ Source: moma.org
