Gallery · Room 10 · UK and US, 1955–1970
Pop Art
Comics, ads and supermarket products, blown up and hung on museum walls.
Wall text
Pop Art emerged in Britain in the mid-1950s, where the Independent Group studied American advertising, films and consumer goods with fascination and irony. In 1957 Richard Hamilton listed what Pop should be: popular, transient, expendable, low cost, mass produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous and big business.
In New York in the early 1960s, painters made those images their subject. Roy Lichtenstein cropped a page from the 1962 romance comic Secret Hearts into Drowning Girl, trimmed its caption and painted its printed dots at enormous scale. Andy Warhol first showed his 32 soup-can canvases in 1962, set out on shelves like groceries; they look printed but are hand-painted.
Pop erased the line between fine art and commercial design, a line designers had never taken very seriously anyway.