This article forms part of the Decorative and Applied Arts Encyclopedia, a master reference hub providing a structured overview of design history, materials, movements, and practitioners.
Peaking in the 1960s, Pop Art began as a revolt against mainstream approaches to art and culture. It evolved into a wholesale interrogation of modern society, consumer culture, the role of the artist, and what constituted an artwork.
Focusing on materialism, celebrity, and media issues, Pop Art drew on mass-market sources, from advertising imagery to comic books, Hollywood’s most famous faces to the packaging of consumer products, the latter epitomized by Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans. As well as challenging the establishment with the elevation of such widespread, banal, and kitschy images, Pop Art also deployed methods of mass production, reducing the role of the individual artist with mechanized techniques such as screen printing.
This book introduces the total reach and influence of a defining modernist movement with featured artists, including Andy Warhol, Allen Jones, Ed Ruscha, Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roy Lichtenstein.
About the series
Born in 1985, the Basic Art Series has become the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN’s Basic Art History series features:
- Approximately 100 colour illustrations with explanatory captions, a detailed, illustrated introduction
- A selection of the most important works of the epoch, each presented on a two-page spread with a full-page image and accompanying interpretation, as well as a portrait and brief biography of the artist
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