Rise of pop art

Pop art was an art movement that drew its subjects and style from mass media, advertising, comics and consumer products. It emerged in Britain in the 1950s among members of the Independent Group in London, including Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi, and developed in the United States, where Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg and others were prominent later. Artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns prepared the ground. The movement challenged the seriousness of abstract expressionism and the distinction between high art and popular culture, using bold colour, repetition and irony. Its images, from soup cans to comic-strip panels, became icons of postwar consumer society.

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