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When we hear the term "pop art", most of us automatically think of the American artist Andy Warhol and the Campbell's Tomato Soup Cans that is arguably one of Warhol's most known works. While Warhol may be the most recognizable face of pop art, the movement did not begin with him. Pop art emerged in the mid 1950's in Britain and the term was first used by the British curator Lawrence Alloway in an edition of Architectural Digest.

In the United States, pop art can be traced back to as early as the 1920s when artists like Stuart Davis painted pop culture imagery. In the late 1950's, pop art emerged as a strong movement to be reckoned with. Pop art was the art of the everyday and the mundane, erasing the boundaries between what was considered "high art" and "low art". Pop art replaced the traditional epic subject of paintings with expressions of today's consumer society and elements of popular culture, hence the name of the movement.

The development of American Pop Art occurred in two stages, marking different responses by artists to the challenges of their times. The first was the pre-Pop phase, characterized by artists branching out of and leaving Abstract Expressionism. Then came the heyday of Pop Art, lead by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg. These artists went about translating objects and human figures into vehicles of generalized statement. In recreating previous artistic achievements as commonplace images, they managed to be entertaining, ironic, serious, playful and naive, often all at the same time.

Andy Warhol's works are perhaps best known for their repetitive imagery. Often he repeated one object, one famous face, or one event, several times on one canvas to draw an observer's attention to the banality and triviality of pop culture. But this was not in order to mock or rebuke a consumerist society, but rather to simply provoke thought. Warhol used to say that he wasn't personally affected by any of his works.

There are tens of thousands of examples of how pop art was undeniably influenced by the mass media. "Popular culture can be defined as the sum of the arts designed for simultaneous consumption by a numerically large audience," wrote Lawrence Alloway in his Studio International article in August, 1969. Pop art was popular precisely because the masses could closely identify with the subjects painted, and whether or not the audience loved or hated this new form of art, they definitely took notice.

Learn more about this author, Olha Romaniuk.
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