Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the United Kingdom and the United States during the mid- to late-1950s. It challenged the traditions of fine art by incorporating imagery from popular and mass culture, such as comic strips, soup cans, road signs, and hamburgers. Pop art was a reaction to the then-dominant ideas of abstract expressionism, as well as an expansion of those ideas. The movement was characterized by the use of impersonal, mundane reality, irony, and parody to "defuse" the personal symbolism and "painterly looseness" of abstract expressionism. Pop art was defined as a diverse response to the postwar era’s commodity-driven values, often using commonplace objects as subject matter or as part of the work.
Some key characteristics of Pop Art include:
- Popular (designed for a mass audience)
- Transient (short-term solution)
- Expendable (easily forgotten)
- Low cost
- Mass produced
- Aimed at youth
- Witty
- Sexy
- Gimmicky
- Glamorous
- Big business
Pop art was a major shift for the direction of modernism, with roots in Neo-Dada and other movements. The movement was influenced by artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Stuart Davis, Gerard Murphy, and Fernand Léger. Amongst the early artists that shaped the pop art movement were Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton in Britain, and Larry Rivers, Ray Johnson, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns among others in the United States. Pop art is important because it made art accessible to the masses, not just to the elite.
