Pop art started in London collages before Warhol’s soup cans
British artists studied American ads from afar in the 1950s; Eduardo Paolozzi's 1947 collage I was a Rich Man's Plaything tucked the word "pop" in revolver smoke. By August 1962 New York critics flagged Lichtenstein comics, Rosenquist billboards, and Warhol's Campbell's cans as socially pointed art.
Pop art rose in the United Kingdom and United States in the mid-to-late 1950s, folding advertising, comics, packaging, celebrities, and consumer goods into painting, sculpture, and print. It blurred high and low culture and often used mechanical reproduction. Britain's Independent Group, founded in London in 1952, challenged modernist taste by debating ads, movies, comics, and technology. At the first meeting Paolozzi presented Bunk! collages assembled in Paris (1947–49); I was a Rich Man's Plaything includes the earliest "pop" lettering. John McHale's son credits his father with coining "pop art" in 1954 with Frank Cordell; others credit Lawrence Alloway. The phrase appeared in Alison and Peter Smithson's 1956 Ark essay "But Today We Collect Ads"; Alloway's 1958 "The Arts and the Mass Media" spoke of "popular mass culture," later clarifying he meant media products, not art that quoted them.
American pop reacted against Abstract Expressionism's personal symbolism with hard-edged, ironic representation. British origins were more academic, reading U.S. imagery as manipulative yet prosperity-linked. Proto-pop painting by Gerald Murphy, Charles Demuth, and Stuart Davis in the 1920s already mined commercial design. Ray Johnson's Elvis and Marilyn collages are called Plymouth Rock and Warholian heralds; Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg's Neo-Dada flags, Combines, and silkscreened magazine clippings prepared the ground. MoMA's December 1962 Symposium on Pop Art formally introduced the term as New York became the hotbed. Roy Lichtenstein's Drowning Girl (1963), oil and Magna after DC Comics' Secret Hearts #83, used Ben-Day dots, thick outlines, and parody to define the premise.
Lichtenstein's 1974 Artist's Studio "Foot Medication" restages his own 1962 Foot Medication print inside a Matisse-like studio interior—one of four parodies of the European atelier genre. Warhol's 1964 Flowers, fluorescent paint and silkscreen on linen, shows how cool industrial process became the movement's signature. Pop both extended and softened Dada: same found culture, less anarchic demolition, more detached affirmation of mass artifacts.
Source: Pop art
