Pop art

• 1. Introduction

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  In a 1947 collage called I was a Rich Man's Plaything, the word "pop" floated inside a cloud of smoke drifting from a revolver. The artist was Eduardo Paolozzi. The collage was stitched together from advertising, comic book characters, and magazine covers, most of it American, and it carried what is recognized as the first use of that small, loaded word. Pop art took that word and built a movement from it. It emerged in the United Kingdom and the United States across the mid to late 1950s, and it dragged comic strips, soup cans, product packaging, and celebrity faces into the realm of fine art. This is the story of how the banal and the mass-produced were elevated to the status of high art. How did a revolver-smoke joke in a Paris collage become a force that reshaped contemporary art? Why did the same idea grow so differently in London and New York? And what happened when it traveled to France, Japan, New Zealand, and beyond?

• 2. Two Origins

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  In post-war Britain, pop art began as a matter of ideas. British artists studied American pop culture from afar, treating its imagery as powerful, manipulative symbolic devices that were affecting whole patterns of life while improving a society's prosperity. Their approach was more academic, fueled by a popular culture they viewed from a distance. That distance instilled their work with romantic, sentimental, and humorous overtones.

  In North America, the movement took shape as a reaction by artists, a return to hard-edged composition and representational art. The American pop artists used impersonal, mundane reality, irony, and parody to "defuse" the personal symbolism and "painterly looseness" of abstract expressionism. Larry Rivers, Alex Katz, and Man Ray produced work seen as anticipating it. Bombarded daily by mass-produced imagery, American artists made work that was generally more bold and aggressive than their British counterparts.

  Pop art was both an extension and a repudiation of Dadaism. The two movements explored some of the same subjects, but pop art replaced the destructive, satirical, and anarchic impulses of Dada with a detached affirmation of mass culture's artifacts. Among the European figures seen as leading up to it are Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and Kurt Schwitters. There were earlier American hints too. During the 1920s, Patrick Henry Bruce, Gerald Murphy, Charles Demuth, and Stuart Davis painted mundane objects culled from American commercial products, almost prefiguring what was to come.

• 3. The Independent Group

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  Founded in London in 1952, the Independent Group is regarded as the precursor to the pop art movement. It gathered young painters, sculptors, architects, writers, and critics who challenged prevailing modernist approaches to culture and traditional views of fine art. Their discussions circled mass advertising, movies, product design, comic strips, science fiction, and technology.

  At the first Independent Group meeting in 1952, Eduardo Paolozzi presented a lecture built around a series of collages titled Bunk!, which he had assembled in Paris between 1947 and 1949. After that presentation, the group focused primarily on the imagery of American popular culture, particularly mass advertising.

  The origin of the term "pop art" itself is contested. According to the son of John McHale, his father coined it in 1954 in conversation with Frank Cordell. Other sources credit British critic Lawrence Alloway. Both versions agree the term was used in Independent Group discussions by mid-1955. It first appeared in published print in the 1956 article "But Today We Collect Ads" by Alison and Peter Smithson in Ark magazine. Alloway is often credited for his 1958 essay The Arts and the Mass Media, though his actual phrase there was "popular mass culture". He later clarified that he had used the term to mean the products of the mass media, not works of art drawing on popular culture. "In any case, sometime between the winter of 1954-55 and 1957 the phrase acquired currency in conversation," he wrote.

  London's galleries soon caught up. The Royal Society of British Artists exhibition of young talent first showed American pop influences in 1960. In January 1961, the most famous RBA-Young Contemporaries put David Hockney, the American R B Kitaj, New Zealander Billy Apple, Allen Jones, Derek Boshier, Joe Tilson, Patrick Caulfield, Peter Phillips, Pauline Boty, and Peter Blake on the map. Apple and Hockney traveled together to New York during the Royal College's 1961 summer break, and that is when Apple first made contact with Andy Warhol.

• 4. New York Takes Over

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  Although pop art began in the early 1950s, in America it was given its greatest impetus during the 1960s. American advertising had by then adopted many elements of modern art and operated at a very sophisticated level. So American artists had to search deeper for dramatic styles that would distance their work from clever commercial materials.

  Henry Geldzahler called two collages by Ray Johnson, Elvis Presley No. 1 and James Dean, "the Plymouth Rock of the Pop movement." Author Lucy Lippard wrote that the Elvis and Marilyn Monroe collages "heralded Warholian Pop." Johnson worked as a graphic designer and later became known as the father of mail art, founding his "New York Correspondence School" and working small by stuffing clippings and drawings into envelopes.

  Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg helped establish America's pop vocabulary. Rauschenberg, influenced by Kurt Schwitters and other Dada artists, held that "painting relates to both art and life." His paintings of 1962 to 1964 combined expressive brushwork with silkscreened magazine clippings from Life, Newsweek, and National Geographic. Johns painted flags, targets, numbers, and maps of the U.S., along with three-dimensional ale cans, drawing attention to questions of representation. Their 1950s work is frequently referred to as Neo-Dada, visually distinct from the prototypical American pop art that exploded in the early 1960s.

• 5. Lichtenstein And Warhol

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  Roy Lichtenstein chose the old-fashioned comic strip as his subject and turned it into hard-edged, precise composition that documented while gently parodying. His Drowning Girl, from 1963, was appropriated from the lead story in DC Comics' Secret Hearts #83, painted in oil and Magna. His work features thick outlines, bold colors, and Ben-Day dots that mimic photographic reproduction. He once explained the link to the painters he was reacting against. "My style looks completely different, but the nature of putting down lines pretty much is the same; mine just don't come out looking calligraphic, like Pollock's or Kline's."

  Andy Warhol was called the "innovator of pop art" by The Observer in 1964 and is widely regarded as the central figure of the movement. The critic Arthur Danto once called him "the nearest thing to a philosophical genius the history of art has produced." Warhol had been a successful commercial illustrator, making advertisements and book and record covers, before he turned to pop paintings and underground films in the 1960s. His silkscreen portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley turned mass-media images into bold, serialized works about fame. Even a retail shipping box became subject matter, as in his Campbell's Tomato Juice Box. Working from his Factory studio, Warhol pushed pop beyond a visual style into a cultural phenomenon. In the 1980s he influenced and mentored a new generation, including Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf.

• 6. Galleries And Supermarkets

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  In 1959 and 1960, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, and Tom Wesselmann had early shows at the Judson Gallery in New York. Around the same time, the Martha Jackson Gallery presented New Media , New Forms in 1960, featuring Hans Arp, Kurt Schwitters, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Oldenburg, and Dine. In December 1961, Oldenburg opened The Store on Manhattan's Lower East Side, a month-long installation of handmade sculptures resembling consumer goods.

  In July 1962, Andy Warhol held his first solo exhibition at Irving Blum's Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, showing 32 Campbell's Soup Cans. A few months later, Walter Hopps curated New Painting of Common Objects at the Pasadena Art Museum, widely regarded as the first museum exhibition devoted to American pop art. The term itself was officially introduced in December 1962, at a "Symposium on Pop Art" organized by the Museum of Modern Art. Also in 1962, the Sidney Janis Gallery staged the International Exhibition of the New Realists, which so confirmed pop's ascendancy that several Abstract Expressionists, including Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell, left the gallery.

  By 1963 major institutions had embraced the movement. The Guggenheim presented Six Painters and the Object, curated by Lawrence Alloway, featuring Dine, Johns, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, Rosenquist, and Warhol. In 1964 the Bianchini Gallery staged The American Supermarket, turning the exhibition space into a functioning grocery store stocked with artist-made goods by Warhol, Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, Wesselmann, and others. By 1968, the São Paulo exhibition Environment U.S.A.: 1957-1967 surveyed the movement's leading figures.

• 7. Pop Goes Global

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  Nouveau réalisme was founded in 1960 by the critic Pierre Restany and the artist Yves Klein during a collective exposition at the Apollinaire gallery in Milan. Often conceived as pop art's transposition in France, its joint declaration was signed on the 27th of October 1960 in Klein's workshop by nine people, including Arman, Daniel Spoerri, and Jean Tinguely. Restany described their shared method as a "poetic recycling of urban, industrial and advertising reality." The group chose Nice as its home base and was dissolved in 1970.

  In Spain, the artist considered most authentically part of pop was Alfredo Alcaín, for his use of popular images and empty spaces. The "Chronicle Team," El Equipo Crónica, worked in Valencia between 1964 and 1981. Filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar emerged from Madrid's "La Movida" subculture of the 1970s making low-budget super 8 pop art movies, and the media called him the Andy Warhol of Spain. He cited the 1950s film Funny Face as a central inspiration.

  In Japan, the photomontage-style paintings of Harue Koga in the late 1920s and early 1930s foreshadowed pop art elements. Yayoi Kusama's work contributed to the movement and influenced Andy Warhol. In the mid-1960s, graphic designer Tadanori Yokoo became an international symbol for Japanese pop, creating work commissioned by The Beatles, Marilyn Monroe, and Elizabeth Taylor. Later, Takashi Murakami drew on manga and anime to form his superflat movement.

  In New Zealand, pop art has flourished since the 1990s and is often connected to Kiwiana, an idealised representation of icons like meat pies, kiwifruit, and Four Square supermarkets. Dick Frizzell parodies modern culture with older Kiwiana symbols. Michel Tuffery, of Samoan ancestry, built his Pisupo Lua Afe (Corned Beef 2000), representing a bull, out of processed food cans called pisupo, weaving in themes of neocolonialism and racism. In Belgium, Paul Van Hoeydonck's sculpture Fallen Astronaut was left on the Moon during an Apollo mission. Evelyne Axell of Namur, one of the first female pop artists, had been mentored by Magritte; her best-known painting is Ice Cream. In Russia, pop-esque work emerged in the 1970s as Sots Art, a counter-culture reaction against state-approved movements. After the fall of the Berlin Wall it took the form of Dmitri Vrubel's My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love.