Pop Art reached its zenith in 1960s New York, where artists including Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein created works that consciously sought to blur the distinction between traditional notions of ‘high art’ and ‘low culture’. The movement became synonymous with youthful exuberance and ‘cool’, its refusal to comply with accepted ideas of what constitutes art finding popularity around the world. In Warhol’s words: ‘Art is what you can get away with.’
The origins of Pop Art may be traced to London in the early 1950s when the Independent Group – whose members included Edouardo Paolozzi, Richard Hamilton, and Alison and Peter Smithson – met to ruminate on the relationship between popular culture and fine art.
By the middle of the decade, the movement had spread across the Atlantic, where many of those who came to be most closely associated with Pop Art began to create work out of that which was familiar and commonplace – often using the mass media, popular culture and objects of mass production as their inspiration. It was a conscious move away from traditional artistic themes – such as mythology, history and nature – and an embracing of that which mattered to ordinary people in their everyday lives. In the words of Lichtenstein: ‘Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn’t look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.’
Tinned soup and Mickey Mouse
Warhol famously produced a series of works in 1962 based on Campbell’s soup cans, thus elevating an apparently functional, commercial item into a piece of gallery art. He also appropriated the faces of global icons – Marilyn Monroe, Mao Zedong and Mickey Mouse among them – reproducing their images in series of often-garish prints. Lichtenstein, meanwhile, produced vast canvases in the style of comic-book pictures.
Compared to the highly commercialized feel of the New York movement’s output, other places developed their own Pop Art styles. Los Angeles Pop, epitomized by Ed Ruscha, was less concerned with consumer products and more with combining incongruous images and mixing media to evoke a particular ‘feel’. Germany’s version, meanwhile, went by the name of Capitalist Realism and aimed to critique consumerist culture, while the French Nouveau Réalisme sought, according to critic Pierre Restany, ‘poetic recycling of urban, industrial, and advertising reality’.
Warhol – above all the others – became an icon of mainstream celebrity culture himself, although the lustre of Pop Art faded somewhat in the 1970s. However, a Neo-Pop movement grew up in the following decade, spearheaded by Jeff Koons, whose subjects variously included Michael Jackson, vacuum cleaners and porn stars.