Art History 101: Pop Art

ART HISTORY 101

ART HISTORY 101: POP ART

Your not-so-intimidating guide to understanding art.

Welcome to Art History 101

Art History has a reputation for being intimidating, but it doesn’t need to be. We created Art History 101 to explore the movements you’ve heard of, the ones you haven’t, and the subtle influences living inside the prints you hang at home. No jargon, no lecture-hall energy, just context that makes art more enjoyable.

First Up: Pop Art

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.

Mood Board

What Pop Art Was Really Doing

Pop Art challenged the long-standing belief that art needed to be solemn or remote from daily life. It was not just a celebration of consumerism nor solely a critique, it lived somewhere in between and blurred the lines between beauty and banality, admiration and irony. It turned outward and asked a new question:

Who decides what is worthy of artistic attention?

Nothing was too ordinary. Ads, tabloids, supermarket labels, diner signs, cartoon frames, everything became raw material.

Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans came directly from his own lunch time ritual. Growing up with little money, he ate the same soup every day for nearly 20 years. He elevated a 99-cent can into an American icon, revealing how consumer objects carry identity, nostalgia and class.

Roy Lichtenstein took comic-book panels and reproduced them at monumental scale, highlighting the visual language of mass printing.

David Hockney painted the pools and domestic scenes of everyday life with an honesty and clarity that felt completely new.

Pop Art’s most radical act?

Challenging the hierarchy of what deserved to be depicted. In doing so, it expanded the definition of art: repetition, industrial symmetry, commercial colour palettes, the aesthetics of packaging, cultural icons, all qualified. It nudged viewers to reconsider how meaning shifts when an image is reproduced, consumed and repeated across culture.

It surfaced a tension: how does mass production shape what we value, and can an endlessly repeated image still make us feel something?

Pop Art’s message: beauty isn’t always sublime. Sometimes it’s just something familiar.

And familiarity, in a world that is constantly changing, can be surprisingly comforting.

How to Bring Pop Art Home

We have quite a few pieces at OW shaped by this movement, but the influence shows up most clearly in our Fall collection Check Please!. Bright colour fields, simplified forms and everyday motifs echo the same instincts that made Pop Art resonate.

With Check Please, we leaned into the idea that the rhythm of daily life is often more visually interesting than it gets credit for.

This collection is about humour, joy and putting something bright on your wall that celebrates the everyday. More than a nod to mid-century design, it’s a reminder to slow down and appreciate the familiar objects that shape your routines. To make something beautiful simply by taking the time to look, and maybe laugh a little at our own seriousness.