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More than 5000 entries on the history, culture and life of Britain (published in 1993 by Macmillan, now out of print)
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pop art
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Movement in painting and sculpture which began independently in Britain and the USA during the 1950s, as a reaction against the solemnity of 'high' art and the remoteness of abstraction. The images were bright, jazzy and vulgar, using the everyday clichés of advertising and packaging.
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The first recorded use of the word 'pop' in art is in a collage of about 1947 by Eduardo Paolozzi (b. 1924 in Scotland); the work is entitled I Was a Rich Man's Plaything and 'POP!' appears from the barrel of a gun aimed at the luscious plaything herself. In 1956 Paolozzi, Richard Hamilton and others exhibited together as the Independent Group, and a small collage in the exhibition by Hamilton (Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?) is often quoted as the first icon of the movement. By then the phrase 'pop art' had been coined by the British critic Lawrence Alloway (in about 1955), but he applied it to the visual ingredients of popular culture itself – not, as it was later used, to the art created from them.
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The pioneers were followed by a second wave of slightly younger artists who were students at the Royal College of Art, among them Peter Blake and David Hockney. It was their work, seen in a series of 'Young Contemporaries' exhibitions, which brought pop art to the attention of a wide public in the early 1960s. Over much the same time span a similar progression had happened in the USA, from the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg in the second half of the 1950s to the emergence in the early 1960s of the best-known pop artists of all, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.
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