The “POP!” that came a decade early
The reason this small sheet of glued paper is in the textbooks is the printed “POP!”, but the easy version of the claim is wrong. What this 1947 collage actually holds is the first known appearance of the word “pop” inside a work of this kind, roughly a decade before the movement got the name. What it did not do is invent or name Pop Art. The term “Pop art” was coined and popularized later, in the 1950s (the critic Lawrence Alloway is usually credited). And the movement was emphatically notnamed after this burst, the “POP!” is a toy-gun sound effect, a coincidence, not a baptism. It prefigures Pop; it does not found it.
Two other things often get tangled with this one. There is also a 1972 screenprint with this same title, a printed reproduction issued as part of Paolozzi’s 1972 BUNK! screenprint portfolio, copies of which live in the V&A and elsewhere. That is not this. This is the unique 1947 paper collage, the one-of-one original, and everything here describes the collage, not the print. And the two dates do not merge: made 1947, first shown 1952.
The collage’s own afterlife was quiet. It was gathered with the others into the group the Tate catalogues as Ten Collages from BUNK, and in 1971, around his Tate retrospective, Paolozzi gave them to the gallery, presented, not sold. It hangs today in the Tatein London as accession T01462, held in the prints and drawings collection, viewable by appointment. Up close, the real surprise is still the smallness: one of the most consequential gestures in twentieth-century art is a letter-paper-sized scrapbook of someone else’s advertisements.
What makes it a break is what it treats as raw material. Serious art in 1940s Britain still filed pulp covers, soda ads, toy packaging and pin-ups under throwaway, beneath art. Collage itself was nothing new; the Cubists were gluing paper in 1912, and the Dada photomonteurs a generation earlier already cut commercial print, but they used it for shock or political montage, not as a celebration of consumer abundance. Paolozzi did the unthinkable thing: he treated the ready-made commercial image as the actual material and subject of art, lifting an ad, a pulp cover, a pop-gun wrapper intact and arranging them into a picture about glamour, consumption and the American mass-culture dream. He did it in austerity Britain in 1947, when those American goods were objects of longing, and he did it years before Pop Art existed as a named movement and roughly a decade before Warhol and Lichtenstein. The everyday printed surface of consumer capitalism had become, all at once, a legitimate thing to make a picture out of. The supermarket walked into the gallery, and it walked in here.