The centre of American Pop Art was unquestionably New York, the city that had the greatest and most important underground culture. The artists, unlike in England, had already experienced the depiction of mass productions and popular culture, due to the fact that earlier many of them had worked as commercial painters, so they were familiar with huge billboards, clear figures and with the activity to lure mobs into the consuming of a product. 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. The art movement consisted of three main waves, though the third one was insignificant because the artists of this generation could not come up with anything new, but copied the style of their predecessors. 
The first wave truly started in the early 1960s and lined up the five most popular artists, the cores of Pop Art: Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist and Tom Wesselmann, along with a bunch of other notable artists.

The art style of Lichtenstein is well-known to everyone, if not recognised by his name, then by his pictures. His representational technique is still  constantly used for commercial purposes, as it is effective and spectacular. He is famous for creating pictures that seem to be taken from comic strips, or actually painting a concrete panel taken out from a comic book. Everything from the character design, with its clear contures, through the emotional speech boxes, to the black dots in the background, indicating motion and giving the impression of printed paper, reminds us of classical DC comics. According to an anecdote he took up this form of representation, because his son complained that Lichtenstein is supposedly an artist, but never draws anything ’cool’. So one day, he suprised his son with the drawing of a spaceship taken from a comic book, and he actually got to like its look so he decided on experimenting on. He even painted on objects to make them seem 2D printed surfaces. He likes to use references to artworks of fellow and well-known artists. On some of his pictures he puts text boxes, which may make the picture seem a little superficial, but they are certainly the source of humor. Even though his work is about the most significant in terms of Pop Art, in his time he was much criticised for the usage of comic strips and advertising labels that were not ’original’, and he was selected as ’the worst artist in the US’ by Life magazine.

Tom Wesselmann is famous for his Great American Nudes, a series of female nude paintings, with every figure placed in a different environment of real objects. It is hard to connect him with other works of art, since his main- and nearly only- topic was naked women. If we look at any kind of commercial, we discover that products are likely to be advertised with a pretty woman. Wesselmann puts the emphasise on the exploitation of these women; on the creating a product out of a human being in our own society. He gives his figures a sharper, but cleaner form; the figures are motionless, but they are still charged with energy. The colours are simple, there are no shades, but they are really expressive. Apart from the nude, an exhibited work of art consists of different kinds of objects, such as radios, telephones or even bigger pieces of furniture. The telephone rings occasionally and noises of the street comes from the radio. His other series depicts still lifes of cigarette packs and whisky bottles.

James Rosenquist has a real advertising designer background; he used to work on enormous billboards before he became a Pop artist. Being high above the ground, but just inches from the huge painting, he realised that from that close, seeing only a fraction of the full picture, it completely lost meaning, and had no emotional impact on the spectator. He planted his discovery into his art: he painted enlarged disorganised images taken from billboards that seemingly had no connection. They act upon the viewer: they do not transmit deep feelings; the large ’image-bits’ are however realistic, they seem abstract, so they entrance the audience. What is interesting is that Rosenquist avoided the depiction of natural environment throughout his whole work. Where natural motifs do appear, are his collages. He used neon pipes, pieces of plastic and wood, and turned these artificial materials into emblems of nature. He is probably the artist to use the greatest variety of materials and representational techniques.

Claes Oldenburg's works mostly consist of objects, or rather sculptures. He sews, sticks and forms products of consuming culture, for example: hamburgers, cakes, ice-creams, from texture, plastic, wood, metal and several kinds of other materials. And the material is indeed the key, when it comes to these ’soft sculptures’; Oldenburg creates his objects to be touchable, and due to their lightness, they change their forms when being touched. According to the artist, there is verbal, not pictorial relation between the depicted object, so one has to look below the surface to discover the hidden satirical message. This bizarre representation of objects comes obviously from Surrealist sources, but Oldenburg does not put his works into controversial environments. Apart from putting the products of popular culture into the srtangest materials, he is famous for enlarging everyday objects- from shuttlecocks to banana peels-, making huge sculptures out of them. 

Undoubtedly, the most famous of the Pop Art core is Andy Warhol. There is hardly anyone who would not know at least about one of his works. His series of serigraphy (or silk screen, a printing technique, where the image we want to multiply is put on some fine material, and with the help of paint or dye penetrating through the cloth, we recieve the print of the wished picture) paintings of well-known products, movie stars and cartoon characters, for example Campbell’s Soup cans, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, or Mickey Mouse, are probably the first things that come into one’s mind hearing the term ’Pop Art’. The intention of this habit of reproducing the same image again and again is on the one hand to celebrate and depict popular culture and its products, but on the other hand to show how art is a product as well, how easy it is to multiply even masterpieces, like Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa- Warhol made screenprints of both world-famous pictures. This view on art and life makes his style the most impersonal of the Pop artists. He percieves everyday happenings coolly, without any particular emotion. He represents social problems, such as racial prejudice, the same way as his much-mentioned soup cans. Even though the pictures express no feelings at all, it is highly probable that the spectators will experience intense emotions. The best example that can be given to demonstrate this cold approach towards life is his Death and Disaster series, which includes paintings and prints of the cruel truth- an electric chair or a jet crash for instance. This blatant statement of our everyday’s disasters evokes the true feelings, unlike the fake soap-operas and movies that convey the message that all is fine, everybody is happy. Warhol’s seemingly only aim was to make bussiness out of art; to create a new product and become a successful bussiness person. His late works could be considered the least valuable, so as to test his own value as a product, to see if a popular merchandise (art) is consumed in the same amount (or even more, as more people get to know it, and try to obtain pictures of the latest trend) even if its quality drops. He created a star image for himself, but in a rather artistic way. He held exhibitions of his ’real’ life, escorting people through his home and studio- but the guide was actually just a hired man wearing a white wig; Warhol was not even present, he was only involved from far away.
 

Apart from the core of Pop Art, there were many talented and creative artists at the time, Robert Indiana for instance, who was mainly using geometric signs and logos as the subject of his pictures; his art was clearly non-figurative and he could be considered the most literary of the Pop artists: he often used references of American poetry and literature. In addition, in his paintings, Indiana also dealt with historical and social issues.
 

The second significant wave of New York Pop Art included artist such as John Wesley, who most of the time used pale hues of blue, white, pink and green, and eroticism constantly appeared on his paintings; Allan D’Arcangelo, whose simplicity and yet wonderful depiction of perspective and distance amazes the viewer; and Robert Watts, who is famous for making food sculptures, but unlike Oldenburg he used heavier materials for his works.

See the pictures here