Pop Art

The pop art movement emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist’s use of the mass-produced commercial imagery of popular culture could validly become part of the ethos of fine art.

Pop art is characterized by themes and techniques drawn from popular mass culture (as opposed to elitist art culture); such as advertising, magazines, television, comic books etc. It is also associated with the artists’ use of mechanical means of reproduction or rendering techniques. The movement is widely seen as a reaction to the then dominant ideas of abstract expressionism, as well as an expansion upon them.

In pop art, the epic was replaced with the everyday and the mass-produced awarded the same significance as the unique; the gulf between ``high art'' and ``low art'' began to erode. The media and advertising were favourite subjects for Pop Art's often witty celebrations of consumer society. Perhaps the greatest Pop artist, whose innovations have affected so much subsequent art, was the American artist, Andy Warhol (1928-87). Although the original ‘Godfather of Pop’ was British artist Peter Blake.

In Britain pop art began as a celebration post-war consumerism and reflected the impact of American popular culture, as promulgated through the movies and music charts.