Pop art was a movement, mostly among painters, which used common, everyday objects and cultural elements (the media, comics, celebrities, food) as its focus. It deliberately took a more populist tone than most art at the time, which was considered the domain of academics and the upper class. The heyday of pop art coincided with the youth movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The movement lost much of its momentum by the end of the 1970s although pop art has never totally gone away.
Andy Warhol
Probably the best-known pop artist was Andy Warhol (1928-1987). Warhol began his professional career as a commercial artist, doing illustrations for magazines and occasionally designing window displays for large department stores. But Warhol's big breakthrough came once he began silkscreening cultural icons such as a Campbell's soup can, Marilyn Monroe, and Mao Zedong in bright, unusual colors. Warhol dabbled in photography and made several experimental films with members of the Factory, a group of artists, models, and hangers-on who frequented Warhol's studio. He also created album covers for the Velvet Underground and the Rolling Stones.
Roy Lichtenstein
Along with Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997) is considered the most influential and famous of the pop artists. He had no particular interest or training in art until he was fourteen, when he began taking painting lessons on the weekends. Lichtenstein eventually received a master's degree in art and began teaching at various universities. Like Warhol's, his own art started with commercial projects and window displays. Although he created a series of American West and abstract paintings, he achieved great success with his comic-style paintings, artwork that imitated the look of American comic strips and cartoons.
Keith Haring
Keith Haring (1958-1990) began drawing as a young child, heavily influenced by drawings from Dr. Seuss books and Disney. Although he began training to be a commercial artist, he dropped out of art school and began studying on his own, making his first art exhibition in 1978. After moving to New York, Haring made friends with other alternative artists and began working on a series of subway drawings, simple line drawings on blank panels, mounted around the underground subway system. Haring's work was known for its simplicity and immediacy and become so popular that he opened a successful art store featuring numerous products with his designs. He often licensed his images, which led to a great deal of criticism but also made Haring one of the most famous artists in the world.
David Hockney
David Hockney (b. 1937) began drawing in elementary school, where he first decided that he wanted to become an artist. He spent so much time drawing that his other subjects suffered, and the headmaster refused to let him transfer to an art school until he got his academic grades up. Hockney painted and traveled during his college years, eventually making his way to New York, where he met and became a friend of Andy Warhol. Hockney created a series of highly realistic paintings and then turned for a time to photography although he eventually tired of it and came back to painting.
