POP ART

Mass culture, popular taste and kitsch, considered outside the limits of fine art, were the provocative new themes of Pop art, a movement that enjoyed great prominence in the late 1950s and 1960s. Rejecting the idea that art and life could be separated, artists in both Britain and the United States--among them Peter Blake, Richard Hamilton, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist and Andy Warhol--used mass-produced objects and photographic images to make a blatant connection with the real world and its infatuation with consumerism. From its earliest beginnings in the irreverence of Dada and Surrealism, David McCarthy follows the development of Pop art to its rise in popularity as an art form that celebrated the glamor and hedonism of the newly commercialized Western world while at the same time acknowledging its superficiality and transience.