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Pop Art

POP ART STYLE

Perhaps one of the most influential contemporary art movements, Pop art emerged in the 1950s. In stark contrast to traditional artistic practice, its practitioners drew on imagery from popular culture — comic books, advertising, product packaging and other commercial media — to create original Pop art paintings, prints and sculptures that celebrated ordinary life in the most literal way.

ORIGINS OF POP ART

CHARACTERISTICS OF POP ART 

  • Bold imagery
  • Bright, vivid colors
  • Straightforward concepts
  • Engagement with popular culture 
  • Incorporation of everyday objects from advertisements, cartoons, comic books and other popular mass media

POP ARTISTS TO KNOW

ORIGINAL POP ART ON 1STDIBS

The Pop art movement started in the United Kingdom as a reaction, both positive and critical, to the period’s consumerism. Its goal was to put popular culture on the same level as so-called high culture.

Richard Hamilton’s 1956 collage Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? is widely believed to have kickstarted this unconventional new style.

Pop art works are distinguished by their bold imagery, bright colors and seemingly commonplace subject matter. Practitioners sought to challenge the status quo, breaking with the perceived elitism of the previously dominant Abstract Expressionism and making statements about current events. Other key characteristics of Pop art include appropriation of imagery and techniques from popular and commercial culture; use of different media and formats; repetition in imagery and iconography; incorporation of mundane objects from advertisements, cartoons and other popular media; hard edges; and ironic and witty treatment of subject matter.

Although British artists launched the movement, they were soon overshadowed by their American counterparts. Pop art is perhaps most closely identified with American Pop artist Andy Warhol, whose clever appropriation of motifs and images helped to transform the artistic style into a lifestyle. Most of the best-known American artists associated with Pop art started in commercial art (Warhol made whimsical drawings as a hobby during his early years as a commercial illustrator), a background that helped them in merging high and popular culture.

Roy Lichtenstein was another prominent Pop artist that was active in the United States. Much like Warhol, Lichtenstein drew his subjects from print media, particularly comic strips, producing paintings and sculptures characterized by primary colors, bold outlines and halftone dots, elements appropriated from commercial printing. Recontextualizing a lowbrow image by importing it into a fine-art context was a trademark of his style. Neo-Pop artists like Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami further blurred the line between art and popular culture.

Pop art rose to prominence largely through the work of a handful of men creating works that were unemotional and distanced — in other words, stereotypically masculine. However, there were many important female Pop artists, such as Rosalyn Drexler, whose significant contributions to the movement are recognized today. Best known for her work as a playwright and novelist, Drexler also created paintings and collages embodying Pop art themes and stylistic features.

Read more about the history of Pop art and the style’s famous artists, and browse the collection of original Pop art paintings, prints, photography and other works for sale on 1stDibs.

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Style: Pop Art
"Samuel the Buffalo" - Acrylic on Canvas
"Samuel the Buffalo" - Acrylic on Canvas

"Samuel the Buffalo" - Acrylic on Canvas

By Melinda McLeod

Located in West Hollywood, CA

Melinda has studied life and its movements, developing a remarkably keen artistic technique with her flowing expressionistic style. Growing up in the Midwest she was enamored with n...

Category

2010s Pop Art

Materials

Canvas, Acrylic

Giant Donut in Inglewood (Red) - Framed Colorful Still Life Mixed Media Artwork
Giant Donut in Inglewood (Red) - Framed Colorful Still Life Mixed Media Artwork

Giant Donut in Inglewood (Red) - Framed Colorful Still Life Mixed Media Artwork

By Fabio Coruzzi

Located in Los Angeles, CA

Italian artist Fabio Coruzzi merges painting and photography into one imaginative image that offers a new outlook on an otherwise ordinary urban scene. His artworks represent an auth...

Category

21st Century and Contemporary Pop Art

Materials

Paper, Oil Pastel, Acrylic, Gel Pen, Graphite, Mixed Media, Spray Paint,...

Felony Money - Original Monopoly Man Figurative Acrylic Pop Artwork by Gary John
Felony Money - Original Monopoly Man Figurative Acrylic Pop Artwork by Gary John

Felony Money - Original Monopoly Man Figurative Acrylic Pop Artwork by Gary John

By Gary John

Located in Los Angeles, CA

Gary John's pop-street artworks have a whimsical, yet exciting and bold quality inspired by classic cartoon and comic book characters. Blending pop sensibilities with a roughened fau...

Category

21st Century and Contemporary Pop Art

Materials

Mixed Media, Acrylic, Newsprint

Portrait Timid Dachshund dogs Walk - FRENCH SCHOOL Chut les Barbizons! DOG
Portrait Timid Dachshund dogs Walk - FRENCH SCHOOL Chut les Barbizons! DOG

Portrait Timid Dachshund dogs Walk - FRENCH SCHOOL Chut les Barbizons! DOG

By bazevian animal

Located in Zofingen, AG

Timids Dachshund Dogs Walk In the artistic world, animals have always been key protagonists in expressing the power and beauty of the wild. Artists often use animals as symbols to ...

Category

2010s Pop Art

Materials

Glue, Mixed Media, Oil, Spray Paint, Acrylic

"Bella the Buffalo" - Acrylic on Canvas
"Bella the Buffalo" - Acrylic on Canvas

"Bella the Buffalo" - Acrylic on Canvas

By Melinda McLeod

Located in West Hollywood, CA

Melinda has studied life and its movements, developing a remarkably keen artistic technique with her flowing expressionistic style. Growing up in the Midwest she was enamored with n...

Category

2010s Pop Art

Materials

Canvas, Acrylic

"Bernard the Bull" - Acrylic on Canvas
"Bernard the Bull" - Acrylic on Canvas

"Bernard the Bull" - Acrylic on Canvas

By Melinda McLeod

Located in West Hollywood, CA

Melinda has studied life and its movements, developing a remarkably keen artistic technique with her flowing expressionistic style. Growing up in the Midwest she was enamored with n...

Category

2010s Pop Art

Materials

Canvas, Acrylic

Only Elvis Gold Limited Edition Print, Pop Art, Signed, 40x30 Inches
Only Elvis Gold Limited Edition Print, Pop Art, Signed, 40x30 Inches

Only Elvis Gold Limited Edition Print, Pop Art, Signed, 40x30 Inches

By BATIK

Located in London, GB

Only Elvis Gold by B A T I K signed limited edition print pop art print of the infamous mock arrest mugshot of Elvis Presley. Archival pigment print paper size 40x30 inches / 1...

Category

2010s Pop Art

Materials

Color, Archival Pigment

1960s Pop Art Unique Cast Bronze Sculpture Americana Folk Art William King
1960s Pop Art Unique Cast Bronze Sculpture Americana Folk Art William King

1960s Pop Art Unique Cast Bronze Sculpture Americana Folk Art William King

By William King (b.1925)

Located in Surfside, FL

Mid-Century Modern wrought iron sculpture a person with oversize top, shorts, and carrying a hat, signed, artist's monogram and cipher, further mounted on a plaster base. 28" H. This a unique piece. It is interesting in that it speaks of a transition, leading into the later aluminum public pieces that kind of defined his work in the 70's. According to his estate this is most probably cast bronze. It might possibly be wrought iron.. William Dickey King was born in 1925 in Jacksonville, Florida and grew up in the Coconut Grove neighborhood of Miami. As a boy, William King made model airplanes and helped his father and older brother build furniture and boats. “I was 19, 20, my mother gave me a hundred bucks, says, ʻGet out of this state and don’t come back until you’re 65; there is nothing here for you,’ ” Bill King recalled in a video interview for the Smithsonian museum. He came to New York, where he attended the Cooper Union and began selling his early sculptures even before he graduated. He later studied with the sculptor Milton Hebald and traveled to Italy on a Fulbright grant. He was a contemporary, at the Cooper Union, of Alex Katz and Lois Dodd, his first wife, and remained close in many ways to their common aesthetic grounding, shared also with younger sculptors such as Red Grooms and Marisol Escobar. The hallmark of King’s early work was radical experiment keeping company with social connection and hedonism. The mix of big, important, innovative ideas and immediate, sensory, in-the-moment experience was a kind of visual jazz. For this was not just the time of Franz Kline’s big open defiant brushstrokes and Jackson Pollock’s all-over mists of intricately drooling line, but of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. If we look at the works that King made in the early 1950s when he got back from his Fulbright to Italy we see free, experimental, open forms that take their cue from jazz as much as art in their fusion of virtuosity and cool.American sculptor King is most noted for his long-limbed figurative public art sculptures depicting people engaged in everyday activities such as reading or conversing. He created his busts and figures in a variety of materials, including clay, wood, metal, and textiles. Mr. King worked in clay, wood, bronze, vinyl, burlap and aluminum. He worked both big and small, from busts and toylike figures to large public art pieces depicting familiar human poses — a seated, cross-legged man reading; a Western couple (he in a cowboy hat, she in a long dress) holding hands; a tall man reaching down to tug along a recalcitrant little boy; a crowd of robotic-looking men walking in lock step. Mr. King’s work often reflected the times, taking on fashions and occasional politics. In the 1960s and 1970s, his work featuring African-American figures (including the activist Angela Davis, with hands cuffed behind her back) evoked his interest in civil rights. But for all its variation, what unified his work was a wry observer’s arched eyebrow, the pointed humor and witty rue of a fatalist. His figurative sculptures, often with long, spidery legs and an outlandishly skewed ratio of torso to appendages, use gestures and posture to suggest attitude and illustrate his own amusement with the unwieldiness of human physical equipment. His subjects included tennis players and gymnasts, dancers and musicians, and he managed to show appreciation of their physical gifts and comic delight at their contortions and costumery. His suit-wearing businessmen often appeared haughty or pompous; his other men could seem timid or perplexed or awkward. Oddly, or perhaps tellingly, he tended to depict women more reverentially, though in his portrayals of couples the fragility and tender comedy inherent in couplehood settled equally on both partners. His first solo exhibit took place in 1954 at the Alan Gallery in New York City. William Dicky King was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2003, and in 2007 the International Sculpture Center honored him with the Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award. Mr. King’s work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Hirshhorn Museum at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, among other places, and he had dozens of solo gallery shows in New York and elsewhere. Reviews of his exhibitions frequently began with the caveat that even though the work was funny, it was also serious, displaying superior technical skills, imaginative vision and the bolstering weight of a range of influences, from the ancient Etruscans to American folk art to 20th-century artists including Giacometti, Calder and Elie Nadelman. The New York Times critic Holland Cotter once described Mr. King’s sculpture as “comical-tragical-maniacal,” and “like Giacometti conceived by John Cheever.” From an article by David Cohen "In a career that ran in tandem with the hegemony of formal abstraction in sculpture, Bill King inevitably struggled with the prejudice that sculpture full of humanity and humor can’t be quite as serious as sculpture devoid of them. But the tide has clearly turned in ways that ought to work in King’s favor, with an increasing number of sculptors, fêted internationally, who are producing work that looks remarkably close in spirit, if not quite as regal in sheer mastery of form, as his own. When art historians of the future connect the dots of modern sculpture then artists like Franz West, Stephan Balkenhol, Huma Bhabha...

Category

1960s Pop Art

Materials

Bronze

CHROMA aka Rick Wolfryd COMPANION WITH HEART SERIES 28.5 inches . . .
CHROMA aka Rick Wolfryd COMPANION WITH HEART SERIES 28.5 inches . . .

CHROMA aka Rick Wolfryd COMPANION WITH HEART SERIES 28.5 inches . . .

By CHROMA aka Rick Wolfryd

Located in Cuauhtemoc, Ciudad de México

CHROMA “Companion With Heart” Sculpture — 28.5 Inches Mixed Media, Resin, Glass Beads, Acrylic Mexico City, Contemporary This striking 28.5-inch CHROMA “Companion With Heart” sculpt...

Category

2010s Pop Art

Materials

Glass, Resin, Mixed Media

Lifetime of Adventures - Original Framed Figurative Man & Woman Pop Art Painting
Lifetime of Adventures - Original Framed Figurative Man & Woman Pop Art Painting

Lifetime of Adventures - Original Framed Figurative Man & Woman Pop Art Painting

By Nelson De La Nuez

Located in Los Angeles, CA

Nelson De La Nuez is one of the most sought-after contemporary Pop artists practicing today. His striking, vivid mixed media artwork borrows motifs and messages from the language of ...

Category

21st Century and Contemporary Pop Art

Materials

Canvas, Oil Pastel, Mixed Media, Acrylic

Hollywood Motel - Original Abstract Cityscape Colorful Layered Mixed Media Art
Hollywood Motel - Original Abstract Cityscape Colorful Layered Mixed Media Art

Hollywood Motel - Original Abstract Cityscape Colorful Layered Mixed Media Art

By Fabio Coruzzi

Located in Los Angeles, CA

Italian artist Fabio Coruzzi merges painting and photography into one imaginative image that offers a new outlook on an otherwise ordinary urban scene. His artworks represent an auth...

Category

21st Century and Contemporary Pop Art

Materials

Paper, Oil Pastel, Acrylic, Gel Pen, Graphite

Pop Art art for sale on 1stDibs.

Find a wide variety of authentic Pop art available for sale on 1stDibs. Works in this style were very popular during the 21st Century and Contemporary, but contemporary artists have continued to produce works inspired by this movement. If you’re looking to add art created in this style to introduce contrast in an otherwise neutral space in your home, the works available on 1stDibs include elements of blue, orange, red, purple and other colors. Many Pop art paintings were created by popular artists on 1stDibs, including Jack Mitchell, Andy Warhol, Peter Max, and Heidler & Heeps. Frequently made by artists working with Paint, and Paper and other materials, all of these pieces for sale are unique and have attracted attention over the years. Not every interior allows for large Pop Art, so small editions measuring 0.4 inches across are also available.