Pop Art

In 1957 Richard Hamilton wrote a letter to his friends, the architects Alison and Peter Smithson, listing what he took to be the qualities of pop art. It should be popular, transient, expendable, low cost, mass produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous and “Big business.” The list reads like a manifesto, though it was written as a private note, and it caught a mood that was spreading through art schools on both sides of the Atlantic.

Pop art emerged in Britain in the mid 1950s and in the United States a few years later, and it peaked in the 1960s. Its sources were Hollywood films, advertising, packaging, pop music and comic books. Modernist critics were appalled. Tate describes the movement as one of the first signs of postmodernism.

Two versions of pop

British and American pop shared subject matter but not a point of view. In Britain, where the Independent Group of the 1950s is regarded as the precursor, American popular culture was something seen from a distance and examined with irony. Eduardo Paolozzi’s I was a Rich Man’s Plaything, now at Tate, dates from as early as 1947, and Peter Blake’s Tuesday from 1961. In the United States, artists were living inside the culture they painted, and pop arrived as a return to recognisable images and hard edges after the loose brushwork and private feeling of abstract expressionism.

Warhol

Andy Warhol came to it through commerce. Born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh in 1928, he graduated from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1949, moved to New York and became one of the most successful illustrators of the 1950s, working for clients including Tiffany & Co., The New York Times and Columbia Records. Most of that work began from photographs, a method he kept for life. In 1962 his series of Campbell’s Soup Cans made him famous, and the same year he began his celebrity portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Elizabeth Taylor, alongside the darker “death and disaster” paintings of electric chairs and car crashes. From 1963 he made films, among them Sleep and Empire, and the four-minute Screen Tests. Tate holds his Marilyn Diptych of 1962.

Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein took a longer road. Born in New York in 1923, he taught at Ohio State University and at the State University of New York at Oswego before moving to Douglass College, the women’s college of Rutgers University in New Jersey. Allan Kaprow and George Segal were teaching at Rutgers too. In June 1961 he returned to an idea he had tried in Oswego: comic-strip characters on canvas, now painted in a deadpan imitation of cheap printing. He borrowed Benday dots, the mechanical pattern used in commercial engraving, for texture and shading. Among the first paintings in the new mode were Popeye and Look Mickey. Kaprow arranged for him to show them to Ivan Karp at the Leo Castelli Gallery, where Castelli was also weighing work by Warhol and James Rosenquist. Lichtenstein’s Whaam! of 1963 is now at Tate.

Beyond the famous names

Pop was never only British and American. Tate counts Marta Minujín among its pop artists alongside Blake, Hockney, Patrick Caulfield and Allen Jones, and its exhibition The World Goes Pop, at Tate Modern from September 2015 to January 2016, followed artists from many countries who borrowed images from the mass media to make social and political points. Lichtenstein himself moved on, painting brushstrokes, mirrors and entablatures in the late 1960s and 1970s, and Warhol collaborated on more than 150 canvases with Jean-Michel Basquiat in the 1980s.

The articles below look at pop as a set of decisions about images: which ones to borrow, how to change them, and what the change revealed about the culture that produced them.