Pop art for beginners: soup cans, comics and saints

How to read the labels Historical what the old sources say. Later tradition what later writers added. Modern modern practice and my own notes.

After the solemn, mythic canvases of Abstract Expressionism, a younger generation looked around and saw supermarkets, comic books, film stars and advertising everywhere. Instead of turning away from mass culture, they painted it. Pop art could be cheerful, cool, ironic or quietly sad. It is the last movement in this series, and in a way it brings us back to the beginning: images that everyone recognizes, repeated until they become icons.

Three layers

Historical What the works and records show. Later tradition The myths. Modern How we live with it now.

London first

Historical In London in the 1950s a circle called the Independent Group discussed advertising, science fiction and American magazines. For the 1956 exhibition This Is Tomorrow, Richard Hamilton made a small collage, Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?, now in Tübingen: a modern living room crammed with a television, a tape recorder, a vacuum cleaner and figures cut from adverts. One of them holds a giant lollipop labeled POP. Pauline Boty, one of the few women in British Pop, painted film stars and politics before her death at twenty-eight in 1966.

Warhol

Historical Andy Warhol (1928 to 1987) had been a successful commercial illustrator. In 1962 he showed thirty-two paintings of Campbell’s soup cans, one for each flavor, in Los Angeles. He then used silkscreen to repeat images of Marilyn Monroe, car crashes and electric chairs. Repetition empties an image and also turns it into an icon, like a saint on a church wall.

Lichtenstein and the others

Historical Roy Lichtenstein painted single comic-strip frames huge, with hand-painted dots imitating cheap printing. Claes Oldenburg made soft sculptures of hamburgers and giant clothespins. The Venezuelan-American sculptor Marisol carved wooden figures of families and celebrities, often with her own face.

Pop around the world

Historical Pop was never only British and American. Tate Modern’s 2015 exhibition The World Goes Pop showed artists in Latin America, Japan and Eastern Europe using the same bright language, often for sharp political ends. In Buenos Aires, Marta Minujín built La Menesunda (1965), a walk-through environment of neon, mirrors and strange rooms. Where Pop in New York could look like a celebration of shopping, elsewhere it was frequently a protest.

Corita Kent

Historical Sister Corita Kent (1918 to 1986), a Catholic nun who taught art at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles, made joyful screenprints mixing advertising slogans with scripture and poetry. She took the supermarket’s language and made it sing about love, justice and hope.

The esoteric angle

Historical Warhol was raised in a Byzantine Catholic family in Pittsburgh, grew up with icons, and attended church through his life. In his last years he made a large series based on Leonardo’s Last Supper. The gold backgrounds of his Marilyns recall Byzantine icons.

Later tradition In the same years, the German artist Joseph Beuys cast himself as a shaman, and told how Tatar nomads had saved him after a plane crash in the war by wrapping him in fat and felt. Historians have found no evidence for the rescue story. Beuys built his own myth, which is itself a very old magical act.

Modern Pop art is the grandparent of every meme. The question it asks is still ours: when images repeat endlessly, which ones become sacred?

Try it yourself

Choose one everyday object you use daily, a mug, a toothbrush, a bus ticket. Draw or photograph it six times in a grid, each in a different color. Look at the grid. Has the ordinary thing become something more?

Before and after

Before this: Abstract Expressionism.

See every movement in order on the art movements timeline, or learn to look step by step in the free Art History for Beginners course.