49 Fun Facts About Pop Art

In which two countries did pop art emerge in the mid-to-late 1950s?

The UK and the US: British artists studied American consumer imagery from afar while New York became the hotbed almost simultaneously.

Which London circle, founded in 1952, is regarded as the precursor to pop art?

The Independent Group met at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts from 1952 to argue over advertising, movies, comics and science fiction, bringing mass culture into debates about high culture.

Whose 1947 collage I was a Rich Man's Plaything is often called the first artwork to show the word 'Pop'?

Eduardo Paolozzi's collage shows the word 'Pop!' bursting from a gun's smoke cloud; he pasted it together from American magazine cuttings years before the movement had a name.

Which British critic is usually credited with coining the term 'pop art'?

Lawrence Alloway, the British critic behind the 1958 essay 'The Arts and the Mass Media', is usually credited with coining 'pop art', though he said he meant mass-media products, not art about them.

Who made the 1956 collage Just what is it that makes today's homes so different...?

Richard Hamilton made the collage for the catalogue and poster of the 1956 This Is Tomorrow exhibition at London's Whitechapel Gallery; it is counted among the earliest pop works.

Which earlier movement's readymades and found images did pop art build on?

Pop swapped Dada's anarchic satire for a detached affirmation of mass culture.

Pop art is widely seen as a reaction against which dominant American movement?

Abstract expressionism's painterly looseness was what pop artists set out to defuse with impersonal, mundane reality and parody, though pop is also seen as an extension of it.

Whose December 1962 'Symposium on Pop Art' officially introduced the term?

The Museum of Modern Art staged its 'Symposium on Pop Art' in December 1962, moderated by curator Peter Selz, which gave the term official currency in America.

Which pop artist's LOVE design, first made for a Christmas card, became a US postage stamp in 1973?

Robert Indiana first sent LOVE to friends as a card in 1964; a New York museum put it on its 1965 Christmas card, and the eight-cent stamp proved so popular that hundreds of millions were printed.

Why did Warhol paint exactly 32 Campbell's Soup Cans?

One per flavour: Campbell's offered 32 varieties in 1962, and dealer Irving Blum lined the canvases up along a shelf like tins in a grocery.

Far from his New York base, in which city were Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans first exhibited in 1962?

Los Angeles saw them first: Irving Blum showed the canvases at his Ferus Gallery in July 1962, Warhol's first solo pop show, and the artist did not even attend the opening.

Which future director of Easy Rider was among the first buyers of a Warhol soup can painting in 1962?

Dennis Hopper reserved the tomato soup canvas before the show opened; dealer Irving Blum then talked him and the other early buyers into giving theirs up so the set could stay together.

Warhol began his Marilyn Monroe silkscreens within weeks of which 1962 event?

Her death in August 1962 set Warhol to work: within weeks he was silkscreening a publicity still from her 1953 film Niagara, repeating the face fifty times in the Marilyn Diptych.

What did Dorothy Podber do to a stack of Warhol's Marilyn canvases in 1964?

Fired a revolver through them: Podber asked if she could shoot the stack of four Marilyns, Warhol took her to mean with a camera, and the repaired canvases became famous as the Shot Marilyns.

How much did a Warhol Marilyn portrait fetch in 2022, then an auction record for an American artist?

$195 million was the price at Christie's in New York in May 2022 for one of Warhol's 1964 Marilyns; the Zurich foundation that sold it puts the proceeds into health care and education for children.

What covered the walls of Warhol's first Factory studio on East 47th Street?

Billy Name covered the walls in silver paint and aluminium foil in 1964, earning the East 47th Street studio the nickname the Silver Factory.

Who shot Andy Warhol at the Factory in June 1968?

Valerie Solanas, author of the SCUM Manifesto, shot him on 3 June 1968, convinced he was plotting to steal her work after he lost a play script she had given him.

Which experimental rock band did Warhol manage and let rehearse at the Factory?

The Velvet Underground's debut credits Warhol as producer, though he did little beyond paying for the sessions; he also designed its banana cover.

Warhol designed the cover of which 1971 Rolling Stones album?

Warhol conceived the Sticky Fingers cover: a close-up of a jeans-clad crotch fitted with a real working zipper, with the package designed by Craig Braun.

Which magazine, nicknamed 'The Crystal Ball of Pop', did Andy Warhol co-found in 1969?

Interview began in 1969 as a film journal, founded by Warhol with British journalist John Wilcock; it became known for chatty celebrity interviews, often conducted by other celebrities.

Warhol's best-known sculptures are silkscreened wooden replicas of the shipping cartons for which product?

Brillo soap pads came 24 to a box, and Warhol's Brillo Boxes copied the carton, itself designed by commercial artist James Harvey, in silkscreen ink on wood.

Which New York landmark is the sole subject of Warhol's eight-hour silent film?

The Empire State Building is the only star of Empire: Warhol shot six and a half hours of it one July night in 1964, then had the film projected slowly so that it runs just over eight.

In which city was Andy Warhol born, to Rusyn immigrant parents?

Warhol was born in Pittsburgh in 1928 and studied at the city's Carnegie Institute of Technology before moving to New York in 1949.

With which younger artist did Warhol make more than 50 collaborative works in 1984–85?

Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat worked on the same canvases in 1984–85, Warhol starting with a recognisable image and Basquiat painting over it; they showed the results at Tony Shafrazi's gallery in September 1985.

What operation did Warhol undergo the day before he died in February 1987?

Gallbladder surgery on February 21; his surgeon found the organ 'on the verge of perforating', and Warhol died the next day in New York Hospital.

What printing technique did Roy Lichtenstein painstakingly replicate by hand?

Lichtenstein hand-painted Ben-Day dots, the uniform dot screens of cheap comic-book printing, enlarging and exaggerating them until the printing process itself became his subject.

In Lichtenstein's breakthrough comic painting Look Mickey, who thinks he has hooked a big fish?

Donald Duck thinks he has landed a big one, unaware that his hook is caught in his own jacket; Lichtenstein took the scene from a children's storybook in 1961 and added the speech balloon himself.

Which London institution bought Lichtenstein's diptych Whaam! in 1966?

The Tate Gallery bought Whaam! in 1966, three years after Lichtenstein painted the 1.7 by 4 metre diptych; the work passed to Tate Modern's collection.

What does the left panel of Whaam! show?

The left panel shows a fighter plane firing a rocket; the right panel shows the target plane exploding in flames beneath the giant 'WHAAM!' lettering.

Lichtenstein's Whaam! was adapted from a 1962 war comic issued by which publisher?

DC Comics published the original, a panel drawn by Irv Novick for All-American Men of War; Lichtenstein split the single image across two canvases to make a diptych.

Which absent man does the woman in Lichtenstein's Drowning Girl refuse to call for help?

Brad is the man she will not call: the thought bubble reads 'I don't care! I'd rather sink — than call Brad for help!', which Lichtenstein adapted from a 1962 romance-comic panel by Tony Abruzzo, where the boyfriend was called Mal.

Which Lichtenstein painting, whose heroine predicts her artist's New York fame, fetched $165 million in 2017?

Masterpiece shows a blonde praising her boyfriend's unseen canvas; collector Agnes Gund sold it in 2017 and put $100 million of the proceeds into a fund for criminal justice reform.

Which pop sculptor is famous for giant versions of everyday objects?

Claes Oldenburg, born in Stockholm to a Swedish diplomat, began with soft, sagging sculptures of food and household things, then scaled such objects up into monuments with his wife Coosje van Bruggen.

In which city does Spoonbridge and Cherry stand?

Spoonbridge and Cherry has been the centrepiece of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden since it opened in 1988; water sprays from the cherry's stem, which keeps the fruit gleaming.

A 1969 anti-war sculpture at Yale set which giant cosmetic on tank tracks?

A lipstick rose from the tracks: Yale architecture students raised the money for it as a speakers' platform for protests, and its first tip was soft and inflatable before a steel and fibreglass rebuild.

Which artist painted the encaustic Flag (1954–55) after dreaming of it?

Jasper Johns said the idea came to him in a dream; Flag, in encaustic, oil and collage on fabric, began the flags, targets and numbers that made his name at Castelli in 1958.

Whose drawing did Robert Rauschenberg famously erase in 1953, with the artist's consent?

Willem de Kooning agreed, somewhat reluctantly, and handed over a densely worked drawing; Rauschenberg needed more than a month and many erasers to turn it into Erased de Kooning Drawing.

What did Rauschenberg call his 1954–64 works that mixed painting with everyday objects?

Rauschenberg called them Combines; Monogram (1955–59), a stuffed angora goat wearing a tyre, blurs the line between painting and sculpture.

Which former sign painter made the room-scale painting F-111 in 1965?

James Rosenquist, who had painted Times Square billboards, made F-111 in 1964–65; it spans about twenty-six metres across twenty-three canvases.

Which series, begun in 1961, first brought Tom Wesselmann to the art world's attention?

Great American Nude, begun in 1961 after Wesselmann dreamt of the words 'red, white and blue', paired flat nudes with stars-and-stripes colours and collaged household items.

Which English pop artist co-created the Beatles' Sgt Pepper sleeve?

Peter Blake and his then wife Jann Haworth built the cover as a set of cut-out figures and won a Grammy for it, yet Blake was paid a one-off fee of about £200 with no royalties.

Nouveau réalisme was founded in 1960 by critic Pierre Restany and which artist?

Yves Klein hosted the signing of the Nouveau Réalisme declaration at his Paris apartment on 27 October 1960; Saint Phalle and César joined in 1961, Christo in 1963; the group dissolved in 1970.

What was Russia's Soviet-themed answer to pop art called?

Sots Art, coined by Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid in 1972, turned Socialist Realist slogans and imagery into pop-style parody of state-approved art.

New Zealand pop art often draws on which idealised stock of national icons, from jandals to the Buzzy Bee?

Kiwiana covers the country's everyday icons, from meat pies and kiwifruit to gumboots; painter Dick Frizzell is known for reworking such symbols to parody modern culture.

Which Spanish filmmaker came out of Madrid's La Movida scene making low-budget Super 8 pop films?

Pedro Almodóvar bought a Super 8 camera with his first pay from the phone company and, since the films had no sound, voiced every character himself at screenings in bars.

Fallen Astronaut, a tiny figure left on the Moon in 1971, is by Paul Van Hoeydonck of which country?

Belgium's Paul Van Hoeydonck made the aluminium figure for the Apollo 15 crew, who laid it in the lunar dust beside a plaque naming 14 astronauts and cosmonauts who had died.

Which British artist painted the California swimming-pool picture A Bigger Splash in 1967?

David Hockney painted it while teaching at Berkeley; the house and pool are rolled on flat and calm, and the diver who made the splash is nowhere to be seen.

Which Japanese artist, founder of the Superflat movement, reworked Louis Vuitton's monogram for a line of handbags?

Takashi Murakami set out his Superflat theory in 2000, drawing on the flat planes of manga and anime; Marc Jacobs then invited him to rework the Louis Vuitton monogram, and he later made album covers for Kanye West.

Italian pop art in 1960s Rome gathered under what name, after a city square?

The Scuola di Piazza del Popolo took its name from the square near the galleries and cafés its artists frequented; Mario Schifano, Franco Angeli and Tano Festa were its leading painters.