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House I, created by Roy Lichtenstein in 1996, is designed to be an optical illusion. The house is inverted; the point that seems to be the nearest corner is actually the farthest from the viewer.

*Just What Is It that Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?*, DESIGNED BY JOHN MCHALE, cut out and pasted down by Richard Hamilton in 1956.

Pop art was a visual artistic movement that emerged in the late 1950s in England and the United States. Pop art is one of the major art movements of the Twentieth Century. Characterized by themes and techniques drawn from mass culture, such as advertising and comic books, pop art is widely interpreted as either a reaction to the then-dominant ideas of abstract expressionism or an expansion upon them. Pop art, like pop music, aimed to employ images of popular as opposed to elitist culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any given culture. Pop art at times targeted a broad audience, and often claimed to do so. However, much pop art is considered very academic, as the unconventional organizational practices used often make it difficult to comprehend.

Origin of the term "pop art"

The term was coined in 1954 by John McHale. That is the reason why Reyner Banham called John McHale the "Father of Pop". A "pop" movement gathered momentum and was widely recognized by the mid-1960s. In the meantime, the movement was sometimes called Neo-Dada, a name which reveals some of the thinking behind this type of art, and the strong influence of dada pioneer Marcel Duchamp on such seminal pop figures as Hamilton, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol. McHale had thoroughly briefed Hamilton on the tenets of Pop art at the TIT, which Richard Hamilton several months later, in an unsent letter to the Smithsons, based his definition of Pop Art - "popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, and Big Business" - stressed its everyday, commonplace values.

Pop art in Britain

The Independent Group who met at the Institute of Contemporary Arts from 1952 to 1962/63 included key figures in the development of Pop art, John McHale, Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi. Paolozzi had begun to make collages using imagery from American magazines in 1947 but stated that this was more influenced by his interest in Surrealism than popular culture. John McHale initially developed the concept of Pop art, and he mounted a Collages and Objects exhibit in 1954 at the ICA where he showed his formative Pop art collages including his Transistor collage 1954 and his Pop art logic gaming collage Why I Took To The Washers in Luxury Flats, 1954. McHale designed most of the Pop art installation at the This is Tomorrow exhibit, and followed this two months later in November 1956 with his Pop art collage exhibit at the ICA. Hamilton had begun to study the work and ideas of Marcel Duchamp and developed a series of exhibition projects that blurred the boundary between art and advertising. Lectures at the Independent Group by Reyner Banham included American product and magazine design and Futurism while there were discussions of science fiction and cybernetics. Alloway also lectured on his theory of a continuum between the 'high art' accepted by cultural institutions and the 'low art' of popular culture. It can be noted that Lawrence Alloway was a member of Group 12 at the TIT, and there is no record of Alloway using the term Pop art in relation to the communications and signage theme of his contribution to the Group 12 exhibit in 1956. Lawrence Alloway is often incorrectly credited with the first published use of the term "Pop art", when in fact he only refers to "mass popular art" in his often cited article in the February 1958 issue of Architechtural Design and Construction.

In 1956, members of the Independent Group participated in the exhibition This is Tomorrow at the Whitechapel Art Gallery for which John McHale designed and provided the Pop art visual material and the Hamiltons, along with Magda Cordell, did the mechanical cut out and paste up of the collage Just What Is It that Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?. The work's content provides a manifesto for the preoccupations of early Pop art in Britain as well, as the first appearance of the word Pop in this context, which was a deliberate design reference by McHale to the fact that he had designed the collage and coined the term POP art.

Following This is Tomorrow, McHale continued to develop the Pop art idiom in his Machine Made America and Telemath collage series, and his large Pop art collage mural for Humphrey Lyttelton, and in his numerous works for commercial clients. After the TIT, Hamilton began exhibiting paintings and collages featuring American cars, consumer goods and Pin-Ups as part of an anthropological study that introduced the element of fetishism that became a major feature of Pop art. Hamilton had also become a lecturer at the Royal College of Art where he met David Hockney and other younger artists who would develop Pop art in Britain. Hockney with Peter Blake and R. B. Kitaj exhibited together in 1961 announcing the arrival of British Pop art. The only British woman on the pop art scene was Pauline Boty, also an RCA graduate, whose significance has only later been recognised. Boty appeared with Peter Blake, Derek Boshier and Peter Phillips in Pop goes the easel, a film by Ken Russell for the BBC's Monitor series in 1962.

Pop art in Spain

In Spain, the study of Pop art is associated with the “new figurative,” which arose from the roots of the crisis of informalism. Eduardo Arroyo could be said to fit within the Pop art trend, on account of his interest in the environment, his critique of our media culture which incorporates icons of both mass media communication and the history of painting, and his scorn for nearly all established artistic styles. However, the Spaniard who could be considered the most authentically “Pop” artist is Alfredo Alcaín, because of the use he makes of popular images and empty spaces in his compositions.

Also in the category of Spanish Pop art is the “Chronicle Team” (el Equipo Crónica), which existed in Valencia between 1964-1981, formed by artists Manolo Valdés and Rafael Solbes. Their movement can be characterized as Pop because of its use of comics and publicity images and its simplification of images and photographic compositions.

The most famous Spanish Pop artist of recent years is Antonio de Felipe.

In Spain you can transform your photos in your own Pop Art or Comic.

Pop art in Japan

File:Aya Takano - The world after 800,000,000 years (screenshot).png

From the video The world after 800,000,000 years, by Aya Takano in 2004.

Pop art in Japan is unique and identifiable as Japanese because of the regular subjects and styles. Many Japanese pop artists take inspiration largely from Anime, and sometimes Ukiyo-e and traditional Japanese art. The most well known pop artist currently in Japan is Takashi Murakami, whose group of artists, Kaikai Kiki is world renowned for their own mass produced but highly abstract and unique Superflat art movement, a surrealist, post modern movement whose inspiration comes mainly from Anime and Japanese street culture, and is mostly aimed at youth in Japan, and has made large cultural impact. Some artists in Japan, like Yoshitomo Nara are famous for their Graffiti inspired art, and some, such as Takashi Murakami, are famous for mass produced plastic or polymer figurines. Many pop artists in Japan use surreal or obscene, shocking images in their art, which is clearly taken from Japanese Hentai. This element of the art catches the eye of viewers young and old, and is extremely thought provoking, but not taken as offensive in Japan. A common metaphor used in Japanese Pop Art is the innocence and vulnerability of children and youth. Artists like Aya Takano and Yoshitomo Nara use children as a subject in almost all of their art. While Yoshitomo Nara creates scenes of anger or rebellion through children, Aya Takano communicates the innocence of children by portraying nude girls.

Notable Pop artists

Notable Balkan Pop artists

External links

[1] Interview with John McHale jr by Gary Comenas
Pop Art on Web Museum Paris site
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Index of Pop Artists
Neo-dada page at the Guggenheim collection website
Your Own Pop Art or Comic in different styles

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 *[http://www.fi.muni.cz/~toms/PopArt/contents.html Index of Pop Artists]
 *[http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/movement_works_Neo_Dada_0.html Neo-dada page at the Guggenheim collection website]
-*[http://www.mypopart.com Create Your Own Pop Art]
 *[http://www.lasmilyunafotos.com Your Own Pop Art or Comic in different styles]
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