Pop art

This article is about the art movement. For other uses, see Pop art (disambiguation).

Eduardo Paolozzi, I was a Rich Man's Plaything (1947). Part of his Bunk! series, this is considered the initial bearer of "pop art" and the first to show the word "pop".

Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the United Kingdom and the United States during the mid-to-late 1950s. The movement presented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular and mass culture—including advertising, comics, product packaging, celebrities, and everyday consumer goods—into painting, sculpture, and printmaking. By elevating the banal, the kitsch, and the mass-produced to the status of high art, pop art blurred the boundaries between high and low culture. It is also associated with the artists' use of mechanical means of reproduction or rendering techniques. In pop art, material is sometimes visually removed from its known context, isolated, or combined with unrelated material.

The movement developed initially in Britain through artists such as Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton, who explored American consumer imagery and postwar media culture in collage and painting. In the United States, artists including Larry Rivers, Ray Johnson, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns laid important groundwork by incorporating everyday objects and commercial symbols into their work. By the early 1960s, figures such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Tom Wesselmann brought the movement to international prominence.

Pop art is associated with irony, ambiguity, and a critical awareness of consumer culture. While some works appear to celebrate the glossy surfaces and abundance of postwar capitalism, others question the homogenizing effects of mass production and media saturation. Widely seen as both a reaction against and an extension of abstract expressionism, pop art redirected attention to everyday imagery and commercial design. Through its embrace of found imagery and commercial aesthetics, pop art drew on precedents in Dada while anticipating later developments in postmodern art. By collapsing boundaries between elite and popular culture, originality and reproduction, and art and commodity, it reshaped the visual language of contemporary art.