Pop art - Definition and Overview

Pop art is an artistic movement that is a rejection of abstract expressionism and aims to return to figurative art while incorporating themes and techniques from mass culture. The term was coined in 1956 by British critic Laurence Alloway but didn't entirely stick until well into the 1960s. In the meantime the movement was being called Neo-dada, a name which reveals some of the thinking behind this type of art. There is a strong influence of Dada in Pop art.

Pop art is also to some extent a satire of the philistine acquisitiveness of patrons of art and of official art institutions – for example, early pop artists induced important museums to invest large sums of money in paintings of mundane subjects, done with acrylic paint on plywood, which quickly deteriorated. This movement gained strength in the 1960s and was centered in England and the United States early on.

Notable Pop Artists include:

• Peter Blake
• Patrick Caulfield
• Richard Hamilton
• Keith Haring
• David Hockney
• Robert Indiana
• Jasper Johns
• Yayoi Kusama
• Roy Lichtenstein
• Peter Max
• Claes Oldenburg
• pop.ac
• Robert Rauschenberg
• James Rosenquist
• Wayne Thiebaud
• Andy Warhol
• Tom Wesselmann

External links

• Pop Art on Web Museum Paris site (http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/tl/20th/pop-art.html)
• Pop Art Directory (http://www.dmoz.org/Arts/Visual_Arts/Painting/Painters/Pop_Art/)
• Index of Pop Artists (http://www.fi.muni.cz/~toms/PopArt/contents.html)
• Neo-dada page at the Guggenheim collection website (http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/movement_works_Neo_Dada_0.html)
• Pop Art with stickers (http://www.pop.ac)