New York, July 1962. Andy Warhol, 34, a former advertising illustrator turned painter, shows at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles thirty-two identical canvases. Each shows a Campbell's Soup can, hand-painted but rendered with the precision of a label. The thirty-two canvases match the thirty-two soup varieties sold in supermarkets. The hang plays repetition to the point of absurdity, like a row of shelves. No one buys during the show. The dealer Irving Blum, sensing the importance of the gesture, buys the whole set from Warhol for one thousand dollars (thirty-two dollars a canvas), keeps it for thirty years, then sells it to MoMA in 1996 for 15 million dollars. During the same months, in Manhattan, Roy Lichtenstein, 39, a Rutgers professor, paints canvases that look like enlarged comic panels: "Look Mickey" (1961), "Drowning Girl" (1963), "Whaam!" (1963). Pop art has just been born.

The word is not new. The English critic Lawrence Alloway had coined it in 1955 in London to describe the collages of Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton, which mixed magazine ads and Hollywood icons. Hamilton, in 1956, signs "Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?", a foundational collage many regard as the first pop work. But the movement takes its international scale in New York, with Warhol, Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Tom Wesselmann. The "New Realists" exhibition staged at the Sidney Janis gallery in November 1962 gathers all those artists, American and European (Yves Klein, Niki de Saint Phalle, Arman), and fixes the lineage.

The pop grammar

The grammar is clear from the start. Bring back into painting the images of mass culture (advertising, press, comics, star photographs) by enlarging them to the scale of the canvas. Refuse the personal touch of the Abstract Expressionism that has dominated for ten years. Imitate industrial printing processes: silkscreen for Warhol, the Ben Day dot pattern (aligned colored dots) for Lichtenstein. Saturate the palette in unmixed primary colors. Flatten the composition, drop depth, treat the subject like a logo. In that, pop art ties back, without necessarily knowing it, to Rodchenko's Russian Constructivism and to Mondrian's Neoplasticism: the same will to pull painting toward graphic design, the same refusal of bourgeois modeling.

Warhol moves in 1963 to the Factory, a loft at 231 East 47th Street he wraps in aluminum foil. He produces there his silkscreen portraits of Marilyn Monroe (1962, soon after the actress's suicide), Liz Taylor, Mick Jagger, Mao Zedong, and his object series (Brillo boxes, Coca-Cola bottles, electric chairs, car crashes). The Factory becomes a social spot, an industrial studio, a film set: Warhol shoots there Sleep (1963, six hours of a man sleeping), Empire (1964, eight hours of the Empire State Building filmed in a fixed shot). He is shot in June 1968 by Valerie Solanas, a radical feminist he had crossed paths with. He survives, but the internal wounds will weaken him for the rest of his life. He dies in 1987 at 58, of a post-operative complication.

Lichtenstein, the precision of the blow-up

Roy Lichtenstein, quieter than Warhol, more academic too (he taught at university his whole life), pushes the pop grammar in a different direction. Where Warhol multiplies subjects and media, Lichtenstein focuses on enlarging comic panels and fragments of classical works (Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian) reproduced with Ben Day dots. His technique is rigorous: he draws first at small scale, projects the drawing onto the canvas, traces the contours in acrylic, paints the flat areas with a flat brush, and finishes the dot areas with a perforated metal stencil. Everything is done by hand, despite the mechanical look. He insisted on that: his works are not reproductions but paintings that imitate reproduction. The distinction is fundamental. He dies in New York in 1997 at 73.

"In art," Warhol said in 1969, "everyone has to be able to buy the same thing. The rich and the poor have the same Coca-Cola."

Living with a pop art poster

A pop art poster wants a clear wall and generous light. Chromatic saturation needs space and clarity around. On a very dark wall, the reds and yellows smother. On a very light wall, they sing. The frame: thick matte black, holding the composition without competing with its internal blacks. Oak works poorly, it softens the aggression the work claims. Size matters more than for many other movements: below 50 by 70 centimeters pop art loses its native monumentality. From 70 by 100 on, it takes the measure of the wall. Beyond 100 centimeters, in a tall-ceiling room, even better. It is an art that loves large format, because it descends from urban advertising.

The decorative environment matters. Pop art pairs well with a very contemporary interior, light Scandinavian furniture, metal, glass. It also pairs surprisingly well with a very classical interior, as long as you only set one pop piece in the room: the contrast becomes the draw. Avoid sharing the wall with an Art Deco or Belle Époque poster: the saturated palettes fight and the reading collapses. A room holding both a Warhol Marilyn and a Mucha Sarah Bernhardt will read as a clash. A Warhol and a Mondrian, on the other hand, work: the palette complements rather than competes.

Three threads to start with

  • A Warhol-style silkscreen portrait: a single face, four-saturated-color palette, black outline. Black frame, white wall.
  • A Ben Day dot composition inspired by Lichtenstein: an enlarged comic fragment, or a typed scene. More narrative, denser.
  • A contemporary modernist poster in the modern abstract collection. The filiation between pop art and geometric abstraction shows immediately.

At Montmartre Poster, tributes to pop art and serial culture live in the modern abstract collection. For the lineage from Neoplasticism to pop art, see our article on Mondrian and De Stijl, which describes the geometric grammar that Warhol and Lichtenstein inherit forty years later.