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Pop Art is a 20th century art movement that utilized the imagery and techniques of consumerism and popular culture. Pop art developed in the late1950's as a reaction against Abstract Expressionism and flourished in the sixties and early seventies. Pop Art favored figural imagery and the reproduction of everyday objects, such as Campbell Soup cans, comic strips and advertisements. The movement eliminated distinctions between "good" and "bad" taste and between fine art and commercial art techniques. Pop Art developed primarily in the United States and Britain. In the US, it was linked to the wealth and prosperity of the post World War II era, and artists of the movement responded to the nation's consumer society. Pop Art in Britain was less brash, and had a more nostalgic flavor.

From Biddington ‘s Pop Art Gallery

The 1950s were a period of optimism in Britain following the end of war-time rationing, and a consumer boom took place. Influenced by the art seen in Eduardo Paolozzi's 1953 exhibition Parallel between Art and Life at the Institute for Contemporary Arts, and by American artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, British artists such as Richard Hamilton and the Independent Group aimed at broadening taste into more popular, less academic art. Pop Art therefore coincided with the youth and pop music phenomenon of the 1950s and '60s, and became very much a part of the image of fashionable, 'swinging' London. Peter Blake, for example, designed album covers for Elvis Presley and the Beatles and placed film stars such as Brigitte Bardot in his pictures in the same way that Warhol was immortalizing Marilyn Monroe in the USA. Pop art came in a number of waves, but all its adherents - Joe Trilson, Richard Smith, Peter Phillips, David Hockney and R.B. Kitaj - shared some interest in the urban, consumer, modern experience.

From The Bulfinch Guide to Art History

The Pop Artist mimic the condition of mass advertising, out of which his sensibility had grown. They are much more deadpan than the object which may have partly inspired them, Jasper Johns's pair of bronze Ballantine ale cans. This affectlessness, this fascinated and yet indifferent take on the object, became the key to Warhol's work; it is there in the repetition of stars' faces (Liz, Jackie, Marilyn, Marlon, and the rest), and as a record of the condition of being an uninvolved spectator it speaks eloquently about the condition of image overload in a media saturated culture. Warhol extended it by using silk screen, and not bothering to clean up the imperfections of the print: those slips of the screen, uneven inkings of the roller, and general graininess. What they suggested was not the humanizing touch of the hand but the pervasiveness of routine error and of entropy..."

- From "American Visions", by Robert Hughes

"Rauschenberg's and Warhol's identification with the sixties - they are its most typical figures - is the key to their art. Both are, increasingly, period artists - which is what eventually happens to everyone anyway. But it happened quicker to them since they lacked the strategic distance from the moment that most of their colleagues were careful to maintain. From less strenuous times, their trip on the sixties' Zeitgeist seems a bit irresponsible.In effecting an escape their art must make a liaison with something they both rejected, history-history, of course, being the checklist scored at the exit of the sixties supermarket. How many cans of formal contribution? Social relevance? Any political content? Green stamps for future influence?