What Was Pop Art, the Art Movement that Changed Art History?

While living in Paris from 1947 to 1949, and later in London, Paolozzi created a series of collages made from American print media—ads, cartoons, pulp fiction covers, and pinups—christening them “BUNK!” in honor of Henry Ford’s famed quote, “History is more or less bunk. . . . We want to live in the present.”

Ford’s words expressed a typically American aversion to the past but were also consistent with the broader undermining of artistic production by the assembly line. Marcel Duchamp had pointed this out with his Readymades—mass-produced goods elevated to the status of art—but Paolozzi redirected Duchamp’s Readymade strategy toward the signifiers that stimulated consumption.

Paolozzi displayed “BUNK!” at the IG meeting using an opaque projector. One work featured a juxtaposition of a cheesecake model, an American World War II bomber, and a Coca-Cola bottle. More relevantly, it also pictured a hand shooting a pistol with “Pop!” escaping the barrel in a puff of smoke—the first appearance of the word in art (though a later collage by Hamilton of a bodybuilder brandishing a giant Tootsie Pop is generally credited with giving Pop art its name). Paolozzi’s contention that popular culture could be a wellspring of artistic inspiration was a revelation for his audience.

This brave new opportunity was seized in 1956 at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, where the IG mounted “This Is Tomorrow,” a sort of futuristic trade fair complete with booths that both mocked and celebrated pop culture. The centerpiece of the show was a section featuring a huge painted mural of Robby the Robot from the sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet. The installation also contained posters of Marilyn Monroe and Marlon Brando, a jukebox, a giant Guinness bottle, a film loop of the Royal Navy at sea, and a strawberry-scented carpet.

England during this period seemed like an unlikely place for the birth of Pop art. Damage from the Blitz was still evident, and wartime rationing had only just been lifted. But Britain’s geographic distance from the United States provided a critical perspective of popular culture unavailable in what was, after all, its beating heart. Still, the United States was the era’s hegemon thanks to an industrial infrastructure that had emerged unscathed from World War II, and soon enough, American Pop art stole a march on its British counterpart.

Pop art kicked off in America in 1960, just as the country elevated John F. Kennedy to the presidency; at 43, he was the youngest candidate ever elected to the office. Handsome and charismatic, JFK projected himself as a dynamic and vigorous leader who, while socially liberal, was committed to confronting the Soviet Union with a new strategy: making capitalism glamorous. Kennedy’s convergence of Hollywood star power and politics was reflected in Pop art’s polished emulation of commercial design—and, indeed, some Pop artists, most notably Warhol, had worked in that field before establishing their careers.

Early in his career, Warhol supported himself as an in-demand illustrator, and as an artist, rendered images of Campbell’s soup cans, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis Presley, using the tricks of the trade. He also imported its ethos into his practice, naming his studio The Factory and reprising the process that took commercial assignments from start to finish. He made films, mimicked Hollywood with his own roster of “Superstars,” and became a rock impresario, promoting the Velvet Underground and designing their first album cover. He launched cable television ventures, published Interview magazine, appeared in ads, and licensed his name to products ranging from soap to Jell-O molds. Summarizing it all with his celebrated quote “Business is the best art,” Warhol became as famous as the pop icons he appropriated.

But more pertinently, he mirrored the cultural ubiquity of his subjects by prodigiously replicating them through a method—photo-silkscreen—borrowed from commercial printing. This approach, repurposing the methodologies of mass media, was shared by Rosenquist and Lichtenstein.

Like Warhol, Rosenquist developed his style through his day job: painting billboards in Times Square. He incorporated their size, imagery, and smooth, broadly applied brushwork into his own compositions, fracturing and swirling these elements into delirious collages. His homage to Kennedy, President Elect (1960–61), for instance, bore the image of a smiling JFK taken from a campaign poster blending into ads for a cake mix and a period Chevrolet. His magnum opus, F-111 (1964–65), presented a panorama of light bulbs, tires, spaghetti, and more over the titular combat aircraft in a series of wry juxtapositions that included a mushroom cloud next to a young girl under a hair dryer.

Lichtenstein was best known for enlarging panels from comic books complete with speech bubbles and the Ben Day dots used in mechanical printing to create shading and colors. To replicate the dots, he employed perforated pieces of sheet metal or window screen, achieving the signature look of works such as Drowning Girl and Whaam! (both 1963). Taken from a romance comic, Drowning Girl portrays the head of a teary-eyed woman about to be subsumed by a Hokusai-style wave as a thought balloon above her proclaims, “I don’t care! I’d rather sink—than call Brad for help!”

Drowning Girl sent up mid-century media’s depiction of women, just as Whaam!—a diptych of an American fighter plane blowing up a Russian MiG jet—parodied Cold War militarism. Lichtenstein eventually departed from representing comic books, developing a style derived from them as a way of exploring subjects from art history.

Other Pop artists took different directions: Oldenburg fashioned stuffed vinyl renditions of food and appliances on a comically colossal scale; Tom Wesselmann’s “Great American Nudes” married Matisse and soft porn. Meanwhile, on the West Coast, trends related to Pop art arose in Los Angeles under the banners “Cool School” and “Finish/Fetish.”

The L.A. art scene of the late 1950s and early 1960s centered on the Ferus Gallery, founded by artist Ed Kienholz and curator Walter Hopps. Along with notable exhibitions like Warhol’s first solo show of his (then hand-painted) Campbell’s soup cans in 1962, Ferus promoted an eclectic list of SoCal artists that included Ed Ruscha, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Robert Irwin, and Craig Kauffman. Their output was very different, with Bengston and Ruscha working more or less representationally while Bell, Irwin, and Kauffman pursued a form of minimalist abstraction infused with color and transparency. Still, their respective sensibilities were conditioned by a shared view that Los Angeles was at once a pop-cultural artifact in its own right (due to Tinseltown) and a mirage evanescing in what was, in fact, a desert basin where freeways and glitzy neighborhoods snaked around canyons, arroyos, and bluffs. Taken together, these artists evoked L.A. as a hinge between reality and illusion, both culturally and environmentally.

Ruscha was the best known among the Ferus painters, and his work the closest to Pop art. He often focused on the relationship between words and meaning and how both are rendered abstract by graphic design. One painting, Actual Size (1962), featured the brand logo for the potted-meat staple Spam writ large above a trompe-l’oeil depiction of the product in its real-life dimensions; another composition, Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights (also 1962), depicted the famed emblem of the 20th Century Fox movie studio.

Other Ruscha works emphasized Los Angeles as a metaphor for the dissolution of the concrete into the irreal. Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Fire (1965–68), for example, presented an apocalyptic, Day-of-the-Locust type view of the then newly opened institution ablaze. His images of a Standard Oil gas station, rendered in a fashion similar to the Fox logo’s sharply orthogonal scheme, allegorized the unmoored, ever-shifting character of a city built on automobiles.

Pop art developed on the Continent, too, though it was colored by memories of wartime devastation that were still fresh. This context gave the genre an existential quality absent in America. In Germany, Gerhard Richter, cofounder of what came to be called Capitalist Realism, put it bluntly when he said, “The message of American Pop art was so powerful and so optimistic. It was not possible for us to produce the same optimism . . . or irony.”

In addition to Richter, Capitalist Realism counted Manfred Kuttner, Konrad Lueg, and Sigmar Polke among its ranks, though it wasn’t a movement so much as a collaborative art project, encompassing several exhibition-slash-performances. One was mounted in a furniture showroom, another in the front yard of a dealer’s house, still another in a vacant butcher shop.

Their work critiqued West German society during the early 1960s in two key respects. The first involved the stationing of U.S. troops throughout the country as a deterrent against a Russian invasion of NATO. Tens of thousands of soldiers brought with them the seductions of American pop culture (rock and roll, blue jeans, etc.), resulting in a projection of soft power that was just as noticeable as the presence of tanks. This was something Richter and company understood when they presented a papier-mâché effigy of then-President Kennedy at the entrance of the furniture store exhibit that gave the group its name (“Living with Pop: A Demonstration for Capitalist Realism”).

More pointedly, perhaps, Capitalist Realism interrogated postwar Germany’s burial of its Nazi past under the postwar Wirtschaftswunder (“economic miracle”) that transformed the country into a modern consumer society. Richter, especially, alluded to this collective amnesia in some of his early blurred, black-and-white photorealistic compositions, including one based on a newspaper image of a former Nazi war criminal being hustled into court.

France, despite the fact that it had been overrun by the Wehrmacht in May 1940 and subsequently subject to four years of German occupation, prevailed as a victor of World War II. Accordingly, Nouveau réalisme—generally considered the French version of Pop art—set a tone different from that of Capitalist Realism: not more hopeful, exactly, but more expansive to the extent that Gallic skepticism allowed. Its aesthetics were as Dada as they were Pop, if not more so, alluding to the underlying drivers of mass culture.

Nouveau réalisme was founded in 1960 by the French critic Pierre Restany and the painter Yves Klein. Among other efforts, Klein patented his own shade of deep ultramarine, christened International Klein Blue (IDK), and used it to cover objects ranging from canvases dotted with sponges to plaster reproductions of the Venus de Milo. He also employed it during a public demonstration in which nude, IDK-slathered models left impressions of their bodies on blank canvas. This penchant for showmanship was likewise illustrated by Klein’s image of himself appearing to leap from a wall with his body stretched out, chin first, in what was actually a photomontage illusion.

Klein’s fondness for spectacle paralleled mass media’s reliance on the same, a tendency also apparent in the work of Niki de Saint Phalle, a French-American former model and self-taught artist who, as a child, had suffered sexual and physical abuse at the hands of her parents. Her performative “Shooting Paintings” were assemblages of objects—both freestanding and mounted on hung panels—comprising spray-paint cans and pigment-filled balloons covered by a layer of plaster. Saint Phalle would liberate their contents by firing at them with a rifle, resulting in a sort of Abstract Expressionist mess. She called these “crime scenes” and often produced them in public “executions of art” that at once exorcized personal demons and blurred the line between high culture and low.

Others within Nouveau réalisme dealt with the detritus of mass culture. A subgroup of artists called the Affichistes—Jacques Villeglé, Raymond Hains, and Italian artist Mimmo Rotella—culled torn posters layered and weathered over time from the streets. Two artists going by their first names, César Baldaccini and Armand (aka Arman) Fernandez, fashioned sculptures out of piles of junk. César used a hydraulic press to created blocklike “compressions” out of compacted automobiles and other scrap items. Arman took a gentler approach, compiling mass-minted objects (paintbrushes, violins, watches) into “accumulations” like Bluebeard’s Wife (1969), a translucent resin cast of a female torso embedded with dozens of men’s shaving brushes.

While Pop art in the ’60s became a global phenomenon with variations emerging in Argentina, Brazil, Japan, and elsewhere, it’s arguably in America, Britain, France, and Germany that its main contours were drawn. Its impact has reverberated over ensuing decades up until today, coloring the work of the Pictures Generation, Keith Haring, Jeff Koons, Maurizio Cattelan, and innumerable others.

Pop art aesthetics were derived from popular culture, but in the 21st century, it can be argued that the relationship between the two has come full circle, with the former shaping society on the broadest scale imaginable. We exist, for example, within an attention economy driven by memes, while America’s president is a former reality TV star whose governing style copies the performative kabuki of professional wrestling. Meanwhile, AI technologies are making the distinctions between fake and real increasingly hard to fathom. Whatever else could be said about Pop art, it has certainly traveled a long way from a colloquy among artists one evening in London.