Pop Art

The consumer society that rebuilt Western economies in the 1950s generated an unprecedented flood of images: advertising, packaging, comic books, film stills, billboard photography. Pop Art — the name coined by the British critic Lawrence Alloway around 1958 — made those images its raw material. In Britain, Richard Hamilton's collage *Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?* (1956) assembled cut-outs from American magazines into a satirical domestic interior. In New York, Andy Warhol silkscreened Campbell's soup cans and celebrity faces; Roy Lichtenstein borrowed the Benday dots and bold outlines of newspaper comics; Jasper Johns painted flags and targets; Claes Oldenburg made soft sculptures of everyday objects. The question Pop Art posed — whether the imagery of commercial culture was legitimate art material, and whether the boundary between "high" and "low" was meaningful — has never been entirely resolved, but the work it produced remains among the most immediately recognisable art of the twentieth century.

How to recognise it

Imagery from commercial culture — brand logos, consumer products, advertising photography, comic strips — is the subject. Technique deliberately echoes its source material: flat colour, bold black outlines, Ben-Day dots (Lichtenstein), photographic silkscreen with registration marks and colour separations (Warhol), hard-edge graphic design clarity. Repetition is a common compositional strategy, emphasising the serial logic of mass production. Surfaces are flat, glossy, deliberately impersonal — the opposite of the gestural authenticity that Abstract Expressionism had placed at the centre of art. If the painting looks like it was adapted from a print ad or a product label, and if it is executed with graphic precision rather than painterly freedom, it is almost certainly Pop Art.