Pop Art appeared in the 1950’s and endured through to the 1960’s. Pop Art celebrated simple everyday objects such as soup cans, soap, washing powder, pop bottles, and comic strips, and in effect, turned commonplace items into icons. Pop Art was directly influenced by Dadaism in that it pokes fun at the traditional art world by using images from the streets and supermarkets and suggesting that they are art forms in themselves. Pop Art encompasses definitions of the popular, the expendable, the mass produced, the young, witty and sexy, and the glamorous.
The term pop art is an abbreviation of the artistic movement ‘popular art,’ which was first used by Lawrence Alloway, an English Critic. The Independent Group (IG), founded in London in 1952, is regarded as the precursor to the pop art movement. They were a gathering of young painters, sculptors, architects, writers and critics who were challenging prevailing modernist approaches to culture as well as traditional views of Fine Art.
The group discussions centered around popular culture implications from such elements as mass advertising, movies, product design, comic strips, science fiction and technology. Pop art emerged in the 1950’s in Britain and became one of the major artistic movements of the twentieth century. Pop art caught on in America in the early 1960’s and tended to be used in advertisements and comic books.
