Pop Art Prints and the History of the Pop Art Movement
At Framed-Arts.com, we offer a broad selection of custom framed pop art prints, including a variety of Andy Warhol (pop art’s "pope") prints. Featured pop art prints and posters can be browsed from our custom search page, while this page contains information on the history of the pop art movement. Read on to find out how this movement got its name and gained its footing in the mid-20th century art world.

What is Pop Art?
The term pop art refers to a visual art movement that emerged in Britain in the mid-1950s and in the United States a few years later. Credit for the term’s invention is usually assigned to British art critic and curator Lawrence Alloway--in a 1958 essay he wrote titled The Arts and the Mass Media, he refers to "popular" and "mass" art. Alloway was one of the leading critics to defend Pop Art as a legitimate art form.

One of the major art movements of the 20th century, the pop art movement is characterized by themes and techniques taken from popular mass culture, such as advertising, the entertainment industry, and pulp fiction, to name a few. Like pop music, pop art employs images of popular culture and the mass media in visual art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of its given culture. Sometimes interpreted as either a reaction to abstract expressionism or an expansion upon it, pop art utilizes mass reproduction and rendering techniques that downplay the artist’s role in production, as in Andy Warhol’s work at his studio, The Factory. Warhol was a prominent figure in the American Pop Art movement, and was nicknamed "The Pope of Pop" in part for his role in putting Alloway’s view of "mass art" as "urban and democratic" into practice.

Even though the unconventional organizational practices of mass art sometimes make the form difficult to comprehend, practitioners of pop art often claim to target a broader audience than purveyors of "high" or "fine" art. Pop art and minimalism are among the last modern art movements, and are generally considered either the precursors to postmodern art or the earliest examples of postmodern art.

The History of the Pop Art Movement
The British pop art movement predated the American one by a few years. However, American pop art can trace its origins to the work of 1920s American artists Gerald Murphy, Charles Demuth and Stuart Davis, who created paintings that contained pop culture imagery from commercial products and advertising design.

In terms of technique, mass art’s return to representational painting was a rejection of some of the precepts of abstract expressionism. However, mass art also extended certain aspects of abstract expressionism, such as the notion of the possibilities of art, particularly large-scale work. Likewise, pop art was both a repudiation and an extension of Dadaism. While pop art and Dadaism sometimes explored common subjects, pop art replaced the satirical and anarchic impulses of Dadaism with an affirmation of mass culture and its artifacts.

Custom Framed Pop Art Prints from Framed-Arts.com
We hope this brief article has answered the universal question, "What is Pop Art?" To purchase Andy Warhol’s pop art prints, among others, please visit our custom search page. Happy print shopping, and be sure to contact us with any questions.