Pop Art took the cheapest, most public images anybody saw every day, soup labels, comic strips, advertising, movie stars, supermarket packaging, and made them the content of serious art, done cold. It was the cool, flat, mechanical answer to Abstract Expressionism’s hot, gestural, soul-baring painting, and it started in Britain first, not America: a London discussion club called the Independent Group got obsessed with glossy American mass culture in grey, rationed postwar Britain years before Warhol picked up a silkscreen. Then America made it enormous, Warhol’s grids of soup cans and silkscreened Marilyns, Lichtenstein’s giant comic panels, Oldenburg’s saggy soft hamburgers. The deepest question Pop poses it never answers on purpose: is this a love letter to consumer abundance or a deadpan burial under it, and the same deadpan also hid, for decades, the women it wrote out, the near-total whiteness of its canon, and the uncredited people whose designs and labor the machine ran on.
“Pop Art is: Popular (designed for a mass audience), Transient (short-term solution), Expendable (easily forgotten), Low cost, Mass produced, Young (aimed at youth), Witty, Sexy, Gimmicky, Glamorous, Big business.”
“The reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine. (Andy Warhol, 1963)”
Pop never got a manifesto. It got a letter. Most movements announce themselves with a public declaration nailed to the door of the art world. Pop had no founding document and no signatures, which fits a movement that was deadpan and noncommittal on principle. What it had instead was a private letter: in 1957 Richard Hamilton wrote to his friends Alison and Peter Smithson, two architects in the Independent Group, and listed what “pop art” should be.
The list is the closest thing the movement ever had to a creed, and it reads exactly like the advertising it was about: popular, transient, expendable, low cost, mass produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, big business. That is not a call to arms. It is a product description, and that flatness is the message. There is nothing in it about the soul, beauty, or genius.
Andy Warhol gave the movement its other famous lines, but they are color, not a creed. “I want to be a machine,” he told an interviewer in 1963, and meant it as a compliment. (A line about everyone being world-famous for fifteen minutes is also attached to him, but it was first printed in 1968 and he may never actually have said it, two facts worth keeping straight.)
