Pop Art

Pop Art began in Britain in the mid-1950s and in the United States in the late 1950s and 1960s.
It used images from popular culture: adverts, comics, packaging, celebrities, films and television.
It was partly a reaction against serious Abstract Expressionism, and it both celebrated and questioned consumer culture and mass media.
In 1956, the British artist Richard Hamilton made a small collage of a modern home full of consumer goods, Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?, often seen as an early Pop Art work.

Andy Warhol (American, 1928 to 1987): Campbell's Soup Cans (1962), 32 canvases of soup cans, and screen prints of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, repeated many times. His studio was called The Factory.
Roy Lichtenstein (American, 1923 to 1997): huge paintings in the style of comic strips, with speech bubbles and printed-style Ben-Day dots, such as Whaam! (1963), now in the Tate collection in London.
Peter Blake (British, born 1932): co-designed the cover of the Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) with Jann Haworth.
Pauline Boty (British, 1938 to 1966): one of very few women in British Pop Art.
Claes Oldenburg (Swedish-born American, 1929 to 2022): giant sculptures of everyday objects.

Bright, flat colours and bold outlines.
Repetition of the same image, as in mass production.
Screen printing, a commercial printing method.
Ben-Day dots: small coloured dots used in cheap comic printing.
Collage and images borrowed from magazines and adverts.
Changes of scale: making small, ordinary things enormous.