What is Pop Art?

The term ’Pop Art’ is credited to Lawrence Alloway, a British art critic, who used the expression to describe the subject of the newly emerged art movement, as it depicted (and still depects) mass produced objects and other products that were becoming essential in everyday life, Hollywood celebrities or iconic figures, and so on. Not only in their subject, but also in the mode of representation were Pop works of art related to popular culture. Apart from the traditional paintings, many artists created collages and assemblages, using pieces of newspapers or billboard posters, or even seemingly random objects like neon pipes, repairing tools, packaging paper, soup cans or Coca Cola bottles.
This movement was mainly inspired by works of Cubist and Dadaist artists; in New York Abstract Expressionism and representatives of Action Painting such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg had had a great influence; and in some parts of Europe (Italy, France, Germany) Futurism and Surrealism also had their impact on some Pop artists.

Pop Art was first born in England in the early 1950s, due to an organization called Independent Group, that wanted to create a new theme for all kind of arts. John McHale and Lawrence Alloway came up with the idea of popular culture. This was the right choice, since in that time American mass productions, movies with their stars had already spread in England; people were not judging its influence but accepted the fact that they were living in it and consuming it like Americans. It appeared in three phases.

The centre of American Pop Art was unquestionably New York, the city that had the greatest and most important underground culture.Using these commercial techniques, such as multiplication and enlarging, artists represented the products with pure optimism- as they were living in this culture, and celebrated it, instead of fighting hopelessly against mass production, capitalism and industrialism-, coolness and artificial simplicity, making the depicted object idealised, perfect and desirable. This movement had no political intetions, was not conveying any ideology and did not try to change anything, but the comprehension of art. In New York, similarly to England, the art movement consisted of three main waves, though the third one was insignificant from an aesthetic point of view, because the artists of this generation could not come up with anything new, but copied the style of their predecessors. 
 

Pop Art in the USA mainly appeared in New York, but there were also some notable artists in Los Angeles, California. In some places of Europe (Gemany, Italy, France) a similar phenomenon called Nouveau Réalisme (New Realism) occured.