c. 1955–1970

Pop Art

Soup cans, comic strips, film stars and detergent boxes. In the 1950s and 1960s, artists in London and New York brought the imagery of advertising and mass media into art. What began as provocation changed the question of what art is allowed to be, and made Andy Warhol one of the most famous artists of his time.

Thirty-two soup cans

On 9 July 1962, the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles opened the first show of Pop paintings by a New York commercial illustrator who had so far attracted little notice as a painter. On the walls hung 32 small canvases, lined up side by side like goods on a supermarket shelf. Each showed a can of Campbell’s soup, each a different one of the 32 varieties the company then offered. The artist was Andy Warhol.

A few pictures found buyers. But the dealer Irving Blum had an idea: the series should stay together. He asked the buyers to withdraw from their purchases and acquired all 32 canvases himself, for 1,000 dollars paid in monthly instalments. In 1996 the Museum of Modern Art in New York bought the series. What looked in 1962 like a joke at art’s expense is now one of its icons.

London: the beginning

Pop Art was not invented in America, however, but in Britain. In the early 1950s, the Independent Group, a circle of artists, architects and critics, met at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. They were drawn to everything high culture despised: American magazines, science fiction, car design and advertising. Eduardo Paolozzi showed collages made from magazine cuttings there, among them I was a Rich Man’s Plaything of 1947, in which the word “POP!” bursts from a puff of smoke.

In 1956, for the exhibition “This Is Tomorrow” at the Whitechapel Gallery, Richard Hamilton made a small collage with the long title Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?: a bodybuilder holding a giant lollipop, a pin-up, a tape recorder, a vacuum cleaner and, through the window, a cinema. In a 1957 letter, Hamilton defined what Pop Art should be: popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous and big business. The term itself was probably coined by the critic Lawrence Alloway, another member of the group.

New York: flags, comics, hamburgers

In the United States, two painters who set themselves against the then-dominant Abstract Expressionism prepared the ground. From 1954, Jasper Johns painted flags, targets and numerals, things everyone knows and that are as flat as a picture. Robert Rauschenberg built everyday objects directly into painting in his Combines. This was called Neo-Dada.

Around 1961, younger artists took the next step. Roy Lichtenstein enlarged comic images and even painted the dots of cheap printing by hand, for the first time in Look Mickey. At the end of 1961, Claes Oldenburg opened The Store in a shopfront in Manhattan, selling cakes, dresses and sausages made of painted plaster. James Rosenquist, a former billboard painter, juxtaposed giant fragments of advertising. With the exhibition “The New Realists” at the Sidney Janis Gallery in the autumn of 1962, the new art had arrived in New York. Soon afterwards, the Museum of Modern Art held a symposium about it.

Warhol: art as factory

No one pushed the logic of Pop Art as far as Warhol. From 1962 he used screen printing, an advertising technique that allows a photograph to be transferred onto canvas any number of times. After Marilyn Monroe’s death in August 1962, he multiplied her portrait in garish colours. At almost the same time he began the “Death and Disaster” series, car crashes, electric chairs and suicides taken from newspapers. Endless repetition dulls the horror, and in doing so makes it visible.

His studio was called “The Factory”. “I want to be a machine,” Warhol said in a 1963 interview. He worked with assistants, made films, produced the band The Velvet Underground and turned himself into a brand. Whether his art criticises consumer society or celebrates it is still debated. Its power probably lies precisely in refusing to say.

The overlooked women artists

For a long time, the history of Pop Art was written as a history of men. Yet women artists were involved from the start: in New York the sculptor Marisol and the painter Rosalyn Drexler, in London Pauline Boty, who died in 1966 at the age of 28, in Belgium Evelyne Axell. They often turned their gaze on what their male colleagues merely used: the image of women in advertising. Exhibitions such as “Seductive Subversion” in 2010 and “The World Goes Pop” at Tate Modern in 2015 brought these artists back into view, along with Pop from Latin America, Japan and Eastern Europe.

Düsseldorf: Capitalist Realism

The Rhineland had its own response. In 1963 Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg, both students at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, turned the Berges furniture store into an exhibition space. They sat on sofas in front of a television as living sculptures and called the action “Living with Pop: A Demonstration for Capitalist Realism”. The term was an ironic retort to the Socialist Realism of East Germany, from which Richter had fled in 1961. Sigmar Polke and Manfred Kuttner also belonged to the circle. Lueg, whose legal name was Konrad Fischer, later became one of the most important dealers of the avant-garde under that name.

That Germany today holds major collections of American Pop Art is largely thanks to collectors such as Peter and Irene Ludwig, whose donation to the city of Cologne became the foundation of the Museum Ludwig. At documenta 4 in Kassel in 1968, American Pop Art was more strongly represented than ever before in Europe.

Criticism and influence

Influential critics such as Clement Greenberg dismissed Pop Art as mere kitsch. Others saw it as a philosophical turning point. When Warhol exhibited wooden boxes designed like Brillo soap-pad cartons in 1964, the philosopher Arthur C. Danto asked why these boxes were art while identical ones in the supermarket were not. His answer, that a context of theory and institutions is what turns a thing into art, still shapes art theory today.

Its influence reaches deep into the present: through the Appropriation Art of the 1980s, which deliberately takes over other people’s images, to Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami. How legally fraught this practice can be was shown in 2023 by a ruling of the US Supreme Court, which held that licensing a Warhol screen print based on a photograph by Lynn Goldsmith was not protected as fair use.

Why it still matters

Pop Art made the boundary between high and mass culture permeable. It showed that the images surrounding us every day must be taken seriously, because they shape our desires and our view of the world. In an age of logos, influencers and endlessly shared images, its question is more pressing than ever.