Basic Genre. Pop Art

Peaking in the 1960s, Pop Art began as a revolt against mainstream approaches to art and culture and evolved into a wholesale interrogation of modern society, consumerism, the role of the artist, and of what constituted an artwork. Epitomized by Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans, Pop Art drew on mass-market sources and products as well as the banal and kitsch.

Celebrating the idiom of urban culture

When the kitschy, banal, and mass-market became art 

Peaking in the 1960s, Pop Art began as a revolt against mainstream approaches to art and culture and evolved into a wholesale interrogation of modern society, consumer culture, the role of the artist, and of what constituted an artwork. 

Focusing on issues of materialism, celebrity, and media, Pop Art drew on mass-market sources, from advertising imagery to comic books, from 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 popular, 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. 

With featured artists including Andy Warhol, Allen Jones, Ed Ruscha, Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roy Lichtenstein, this book introduces the full reach and influence of a defining modernist movement.

The author

Klaus Honnef was honorary professor of photography theory at the Kassel Art Academy. He was one of the organizers of documenta 5 and documenta 6 in Kassel, and has been the curator of more than 500 exhibitions in Germany and abroad. He has written numerous books, including TASCHEN’s Contemporary Art, Andy Warhol, and Pop Art.