Pop Art
Cans of soup, comic-book panels, a movie star's face. As a reply to abstraction that had climbed too high into the sublime, the most ordinary images around were carried straight into the museum. It didn't start in America — it started in Britain. In 1956, a collage Richard Hamilton made for a London exhibition became the movement's first icon. Warhol began using silkscreen in 1962 and opened his studio, the Factory, the following year, turning reproduction and mass production into the method itself. This map has come back again and again to the idea that a style's name usually started as an insult. Pop Art breaks that pattern. Accounts differ on exactly who coined it and when, but from the start it was used as an ordinary, unloaded word. Worth noting: not every style here fits the same mold. There is a story about Warhol's first solo show that feels right for this band. 9 July 1962, the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. What hung there were thirty-two paintings of Campbell's soup cans — thirty-two because that was how many varieties the company sold at the time. The show was mocked so thoroughly that the gallery next door stacked real soup cans in its window under a sign reading the real thing, at twenty-nine cents. That joke was only half right, I think. What Warhol was selling was neither cans nor paintings but a device for making you look again at something you had stopped seeing. The name of his studio said it outright: the Factory. Not making, but producing. Is a work still a work if its author never touched it — Warhol took that question on sixty years ago, studio name and all. And the question is still running, all the way to the Now at the far edge of this map.