Collection: Pop Art

Pop Art emerged independently in Britain and the United States in the second half of the 1950s, taking commercial advertising, mass produced packaging, comics, and Hollywood publicity photography as its primary subject matter. The British branch took shape around the Independent Group at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London between 1952 and 1955, with Eduardo Paolozzi (1924–2005), Richard Hamilton (1922–2011), and the critic Lawrence Alloway as its principal figures. Paolozzi's 1947 collage I was a Rich Man's Plaything contained the first printed use of the word Pop, and Hamilton's Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? (1956), shown at the Whitechapel Gallery exhibition This Is Tomorrow, fixed the founding programme.

The American branch consolidated in New York in the early 1960s. Andy Warhol (1928–1987) opened the public phase with the Campbell's Soup Cans of 1962, the Marilyn portraits of the same year, and the Brillo Boxes of 1964, all relying on photo silkscreen as the canonical reproductive technique. Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997) painted enlarged comic strip panels with hand rendered Ben Day dots, including Drowning Girl (1963) and Whaam! (1963). James Rosenquist (1933–2017), Tom Wesselmann (1931–2004), Claes Oldenburg (1929–2022), Jasper Johns (born 1930), Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008), and Ed Ruscha extended the programme. The 1962 New Realists exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery brought Pop to international visibility. The British second wave through Peter Blake, David Hockney, Allen Jones, and Patrick Caulfield ran in parallel.