Pop art was an artistic movement that emerged in the late 1950s in England and the U.S.A. The term is derived from the adjective “popular” (λαϊκός) and was first used by the English critic Lawrence Alloway to describe those paintings that celebrate post-war consumerism and worship the god of materialism. Ιt is characterized by themes and techniques drawn from mass culture, such as advertising and comic books. It developed as a reaction against the then-dominant ideas of abstract expressionism and flourished in the sixties and early seventies. Pop Art favored figural imagery and the reproduction of everyday objects, such as Campbell Soup cans, comic strips and advertisements.
It is a moot point as to whether the most extraordinary innovation of the 20th century art was Cubism or Pop Art. Both arose from a rebellion against an accepted style : the Cubists thought Post- Impressionist artists were too tame and limited, while Pop Artists thought the Abstract Expressionists pretentious and over-intense.
The movement eliminated distinctions between “good” and “bad” taste and between fine art (painting, sculpture, printmaking) and commercial art techniques (photography, graphic design, ceramics, etc). Thus the gulf between “high art” and “low art” was eroding away. Until then fine art was considered as “high art”, whereas commercial/applied art was viewed as “low art”.
Pop art coincided with the youth and pop music phenomenon of the 1950’s and 60’s and became very much a part of the image of fashionable “swinging” London.
The leading artists of the Pop Art era are the following : In the USA Richard Hamilton, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were some of the first Pop artists in America and used popular imagery such as the American flag and beer cans in their paintings, prints, collages and “combines”. Andy Warhol is known for his silkscreens of both famous people and everyday objects, while Roy Lichtenstein employed a comic strip style in his paintings and manipulated those illustrative techniques to great aesthetic effect. The leading Pop Artists in Britain included David Hockney, R.B. kitaj and Allen Jones.
