Pop Art Guide: Origins and Characteristics of Pop Art

Pop art was an avant-garde modern art movement in the mid-twentieth century that emerged in the United States and Britain. Pop artists borrowed and appropriated images from mass media and popular culture, including Hollywood films, newspaper advertisements, comic books, and cartoons. Pop artists saw the established hierarchies of art and culture as detached from the environment they were experiencing in their day-to-day. They appropriated images from their immediate environment in order to blur the boundaries between high art and low art.

Pop art grew out of the popular and material culture of the late 1950s and 1960s, but the origins trace back to turn-of-the-twentieth-century contemporary art movements. Here is an overview of the origins of Pop Art.

• Conceptual roots in Dadaism: A guiding principle of Dadaism—an art movement in the early twentieth century driven by humor and absurdity—is that anything can be art, which influenced the pop artists. Marcel Duchamp’s readymade sculptures—which were mass-produced found objects staged in galleries—were first showcased in the 1910s, and set a precedent for the artist determining what art can be.
• Critiques of society: Following in the footsteps of the abstract expressionists of the early 1940s—who emphasized subconscious, automatic creation—Pop art reintroduced recognizable images into fine art, which was a dramatic shift in modern art. The British pop art group the “Independent Group” emerged in the 1940s in London, England. These artists critiqued British society with collages using images of American popular culture they found in popular magazines.
• American prosperity: Following World War II, the United States experienced a period of tremendous economic growth and prosperity, which resulted in an explosion of popular culture and material culture were being mass-produced for the general populace. American artists and artists in Britain used this newly-democratized landscape as inspiration.
• The first use of the term “Pop Art”: The term ‘pop art’ was coined by the British art critic Lawrence Alloway to describe Richard Hamilton’s famous 1956 collage Just what is it that makes today’s home so different, so appealing?, which is often cited as the first work of Pop Art.

Here are a few characteristics of pop art.

1. 1. Appropriating images from mass media: The most recognizable aspect of Pop Art is the incorporation of recognizable images from American pop culture. For example, Andy Warhol used images of celebrities, like Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor, and sourced images from film publicity advertisements and tabloid magazines.
2. 2. Elevating the ordinary: Pop Art elevates everyday images—like soup cans—to the status of fine art. Artists would incorporate objects or images from contemporary life during the 1950s and 1960s into their fine art, prioritizing the ubiquitous, banal, and kitschy.
3. 3. Repetition: Pop artists often reproduced the same image multiple times in a single work of art. This serialization of a single subject was both a celebration and critique of mass production and marketing in contemporary culture. Artists like Andy Warhol, used screen printing—a technology utilized in mass production—to create his works of art, while others like Roy Lichtenstein meticulously painted Ben-Day dots to imitate the appearance of images in printed comic strips.

Here are some of the most recognizable names from the Pop Art movement.

1. 1. Andy Warhol: Andy Warhol became one of the most recognizable names of the Pop Art movement for his colorful, pop culture-influenced art along with his enigmatic art persona. In addition to his “Factory”—a New York City-based hub for artists, socialites, and muses to collaborate—Warhol is famous for his images of celebrities, such as Gold Marilyn Monroe and Campbell’s Soup Cans.
2. 2. Roy Lichtenstein: Lichtenstein is famous for his cartoon and comic book-inspired paintings using Ben-Day dots, a method of printing images in pulp comic books, to create his images as seen in Girl with a Ball.
3. 3. James Rosenquist: Often working at a large scale, Pop Art painter James Rosenquist painted political and cultural figures as well as images from popular culture, as seen in his 1960 painting President Elect, showing an image of President Kennedy’s face from his campaign poster, next to a half a Chevrolet and a slice of stale cake, which was one of his campaign promises.
4. 4. Claes Oldenburg: One of the leading sculptors during the Pop Art movement, Claes Oldenburg is known for creating giant sculptures of lipsticks, clothespins, shuttlecocks, and slices of cake.
5. 5. Ed Ruscha: Painter Ed Ruscha is famous for his word paintings—which focused on typography instead of images—and often painted with unconventional media, like blood, red wine, juice, and gunpowder. In his silkscreen Fruit Metrecal Hollywood, Ruscha rendered an image of the Hollywood sign on a piece of paper using apricot jam and the diet drink Metrecal.

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