When most people think of Pop Art, they think soup cans and Andy Warhol. If asked, most would guess that it originated in the U.S. It actually began in Great Britain and has a more comprehensive history than one would think. It’s nice to know a little more about the piece of artwork you plan on ordering from My Pop Art. It gives you a historical scope in which to place your work.

British Pop was the product of the Independent Group (IG), formed in 1952 whose members resisted the institute’s commitment to modernist art, design, and architecture. They were particularly intrigued by American automobile design, with its emphasis on “planned obsolescence,” the intentional production of goods that would soon require replacement. British Pop artists had optimistic point of view.

They preferably dealt with various forms of direct action – assemblages and happenings rather than comics or AD. In Britain popular culture and technology was just the subject of the popular art.

In America Pop artists reproduced, duplicated, combined, overlaid and arranged the endless visual details that make up American society, introducing shifts and transformations and acting like commentaries. The most famous American Pop artist, Andy Warhol specially had a lifelong interest in movie stars which first surfaced in his art in 1962 when he begun working on portraits of Marilyn Monroe. Warhol attempted to keep his personal fascination with fame from showing through too clearly in his works, preferring to leave their meaning open to the interpretation of viewers.

The Pop and media role was summarized with Warhol’s famous quotation:” In the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes”. Television, newspapers, magazines and Hollywood are just producing new images everyday. They are only enlarging the popular culture. Everything is just an image, ready to be consumed. The reality aura of art work is death, the millions copies are the survival of it.

It’s great to learn about the societal impact Pop Art has made as well as learning more information about a fun, lively and socially relevant art form. So when you hang your piece of My Pop Art on your wall, you know you have a story to tell!