Pop Art combined with the youth and pop music phenomenon of the 1950s and ’60s, and became part of the image of fashionable, ‘swinging’ London. Peter Blake, for example, designed album covers for Elvis Presley and the Beatles and placed film stars such as Brigitte Bardot in his pictures in the same way that Warhol was immortalizing Marilyn Monroe in the USA.

Pop art came in a number of waves, but many of its icons shared the same interests in the urban, consumer, modern experience.”  The term pop art is an abbreviation of the artistic movement ‘popular art,’ which was first used by Lawrence Alloway, an English Critic. Pop art emerged in the 1950’s in Britain and became one of the major artistic movements of the twentieth century. Pop art caught on in America in the early 1960’s and tended to be used in advertisements and comic books.

Pop art is widely interpreted as either a reversal or reaction to Abstract Expressionism or an expansion upon it. Pop Art was easy to understand, easy to recognize because it was iconic and accessible to the mass public.

Pop Art merged the divide between the fine arts with the media and advertising commercial arts, a divide that had been prominent for hundreds of years making pop art a major success. Pop art had the ability to look glamorous and polished even though it was massed produced and it had a relatively low cost but this added to the beauty of it. It captured the changes in society; the enormous economic growth and instant Hollywood success with celebrities.

Andy Warhol was an American artist and a central figure of the pop art movement. Not only was Warhol very successful as an artist but he was also talented at writing and producing records and films, however it was Warhol’s paintings that made him so famous worldwide. His painting of a Campbell’s soup tin which was used for a commercial has become extremely well known and praised along with his screen-print of Marilyn Monroe which reflects Warhol’s own insight on American fame and stardom.

Of equal importance to American pop art is Roy Lichtenstein. Lichtenstein’s work probably defines the basic premise of pop art better than any other through parody. Selecting the old-fashioned comic strip as subject matter, Roy Lichtenstein produces a hard-edged, precise composition that documents while it parodies in a soft manner. The paintings of Lichtenstein, like those of Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann and others, share a direct attachment to the commonplace image of American popular culture, but also treat the subject in an impersonal manner clearly illustrating the idealization of mass production.

Many artists today still enjoy painting in the style of pop art. Jeff Koons, Mel Ramos, Dennis Ropar and most recently Wanda Pepin has begun painting a series of pop art original paintings.

Sources: www.artchive.com/artchive/pop_art.html and http://www.michaelarnoldart.com/Pop_Art.htm

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