Pop Art deflates the pretensions of the art world

Pop Art came out of a desire to undermine the art establishment. No one warmed to this task more than Andy Warhol. In his pictures of soup cans, comic strips, and movie stars, he fashioned new icons for the age of consumerism.

For centuries, there were accepted hierarchies in Western art. Certain categories of painting were deemed more prestigious than others, certain styles more skilled, and certain places of exhibition more important. The Impressionists and other pioneering groups challenged these divisions, and with the rise of avant-garde movements in the early twentieth century, conventions were gradually swept away. By the 1960s, any artwork, however shocking, was considered acceptable. The artist Roy Lichtenstein has said of this period that, "It was hard to get a painting which was despicable enough so no one would hang it. Everyone was hanging everything." One kind of artistic snobbery remained unchallenged — that a piece of art that hung in a gallery was superior to the commercial art featured on food packaging, album covers, or billboards. This assumption was also overturned by a new movement, Pop Art, and most famously by the American artist Andy Warhol.

In common with many of the important figurative painters of the twentieth century, including Edward Hopper and Rene Magritte, Warhol began his career as a commercial artist, producing illustrations for magazines and advertisements. Warhol was painfully aware of the stigma attached to this. When he first brought dealers or gallery owners to his studio, he made sure that his commercial designs were "absolutely buried in another part of the house," because he feared that his other work would not be taken seriously. Warhol took his commercial roots with him, though, and said of his work that he "did images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second — comics, celebrities, refrigerators, Coke bottles—all the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried so hard not to notice at all."

24 Shot Red Marilyn

Andy Warhol, 1964