David Hockney said it best: “I believe that the very process of looking can make a thing beautiful.”

Pop Art is one of those movements most people recognize right away, even if they don’t know much about it. You’ve probably seen a Warhol soup can on a mug somewhere or a Duo-tone  Marilyn Monroe print at a gift shop. The colours can be loud, the lines a bit more bold and the subjects familiar, which is part of the appeal. But the movement is deeper than the pop-culture versions we see everywhere. At its core, Pop Art began as a shift in how artists paid attention to the world and why everyday images were worth noticing in the first place.

Pop Art took shape in the late 1950s and early 1960s as a reaction to the art movements that came before it.

Earlier in the century, art had taken several dramatic turns:

• Modernism and the Bauhaus championed clarity, geometry and design-as-function.

• Dada and Surrealism embraced collage, absurdity and dream logic.

• Abstract Expressionism dominated the 1940s and 50s with sprawling canvases and intensely personal emotion ex: Pollock’s floor-spanning “action paintings.”

Across these shifts, art had grown increasingly internal, symbolic, and weighted with meaning. Pop Art pushed back. Art could still hold depth, but it could also simply celebrate the everyday. 

Inspiration was suddenly as easy to find in a magazine as in a museum, and that cross-section between the mundane and the elevated is exactly where Pop Art thrived. It was the love child of industrialism, consumerism, and the ubiquity of television – you may not have seen the Birth of Venus, but you definitely knew Breakfast at Tiffany's.