The 1950’s saw a massive shift in attitude toward certain elements in art that were, until that point, considered to be congruent with its definition.  The usual conventions of sophistication, abstraction and romance were challenged in the wake of the mass culture and advertising that followed WWII.  As in the way the Dada movement reflected WWI Europe, the Pop Art movement sought to celebrate the banal, consumerist landscape of Britain and America by using ironic imagery as means of cultural contemplation.  Some would even consider Dadaist Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” as “Proto-Pop” for its use of a found object that made no attempts to justify its presence.  In this tradition, artists such as Richard Hamilton, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein used mundane, representational imagery that was highly sarcastic and referenced ideas that would have previously been considered too unsophisticated for fine art.

            During the 1950’s, American advertisers had begun adopting components of modern art.  Imagery that was once considered cutting edge was being made far less powerful by its saturation of the public conscience.  As a result, artists had to be more aggressive in finding new ideas that were beyond the grasp of American advertising.  In this exchange, the notion of Pop Art was born; advertisers taking from artists, and artists taking it back in a process of “cultural alchemy”.

The Judson Gallery in New York City was an early presence in the movement, exhibiting work by Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg and Tom Wesselmann.  Eventually artists such as Robert Indiana, Richard Lindner, James Rosenquist and Yves Tinguely began exhibiting in commercial galleries in New York and Los Angeles. 

“I've decided something: Commercial things really do stink. As soon as it becomes commercial for a mass market it really stinks,” prophesized Warhol, as he had countless times.  As an art movement, Pop Art’s fifteen minutes were up once it was claimed by advertisers, becoming a sort of parody of itself.   As the Dadaists built the foundation for Pop Art, its ideas made the birth of poster modernism possible.  Still, experimentation with representation, irony and the celebration of the mundane appear in the work of contemporary artists.