Pop Art: 1950s-1960s

Pop art was introduced to America and Britain in the 1950s following the end of the war. It was a period in which wartime rationing had come to an end and a more affluent society was able to indulge in the consequent consumer boom. Artists turned their attention to popular culture and images of advertising, mass media and comic-strips for inspiration, transforming commonplace objects like soup cans, soda bottles and washing powder into celebrated icons.

The movement stemmed from Dadaism, lampooning the established art world by taking images from everyday life and presenting them as art itself. Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg used recognisable objects such as flags and beer bottles as the subjects for their paintings, while the British artists like Richard Hamilton and the Independent Group sought to broaden tastes by turning to magazine imagery. Hamilton’s own definition of Pop Art was to provide a less academic art form for the masses that was "popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, and Big Business".

In this respect Pop Art drew much of its resources from the youth culture and pop music phenomenon of the ‘50s and ‘60s, so contributing to the image of fashionable ‘swinging’ London. Peter Blake for instance, designed album covers for Elvis Presley and the Beatles and placed film stars such as Brigitte Bardot in his pictures in a similar way to Andy Warhol’s immortalization of Marilyn Monroe in the USA. Warhol himself is probably the artist most responsible for bringing Pop Art into the public eye, with his screen prints of Coke bottles, Campbell’s soup tins and film stars largely contributing to 20^th century iconography.

The Pop Art movement may have taken a variety of forms but the artists involved all shared a common interest in embracing commercial techniques to create glossy, machine-produced art based around urban, consumer, modern experiences, so separating them from the painterly, insular inclinations of the Abstract Expressionist movement that preceded them.

Our Art on Demand gallery contains the following pop art prints, posters and canvases: