What is Pop Art?
Pop art by definition is: art based on modern popular culture and the mass media, especially as a critical or ironic comment on traditional fine art values. By creating paintings or sculptures of mass culture objects and media stars, the Pop art movement aimed to blur the boundaries between "high" art and "low" culture. The concept that there is no hierarchy of culture and that art may borrow from any source has been one of the most influential characteristics of Pop art. Pop artists believed everything is inter-connected, and therefore sought to make those connections literal in their artwork. Although Pop art encompasses a wide variety of work with very different attitudes and postures, much of it is somewhat emotionally removed.
Who Started the Movement?
In 1952, a gathering of artists in London calling themselves the Independent Group began meeting regularly. It was responsible for the formulation, discussion and dissemination of many of the basic ideas of British pop art and of much other new British art in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Leading artists involved were Richard Hamilton, Nigel Henderson, John McHale, Sir Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turnbull. The IG also included the critics Lawrence Alloway and Rayner Banham, and the architects Colin St John Wilson, and Alison and Peter Smithson. By the mid 1950s, the artists working in New York City faced a critical juncture in modern art: following the Abstract Expressionists or rebel against the strict formalism advocated by many schools of modernism.