American Pop Art

American Pop Art highlights the generation of American artists that rejected in the early 1960s the primacy of the gesture and self-expression so dear to the exponents of American Abstract Expressionism. Pop artists made free and full use of the iconographic resources and techniques of commercial art and mass media to create works in a simple, direct style. The popular images created by John Chamberlain, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, and Andy Warhol are an ironic counterpoint to the world of "great art" and can be seen as either celebrations or as subtly subversive criticisms of consumer culture.