The culture of the masses, so different from the upper spheres of Art, finally triumphed on international circuits, thanks to the Pop movement. This movement, born as a reaction against the elitism of Abstraction, eventually took its place in an art market that would soon begin to avidly pursue the new symbols that were based on reproducing consumer items, such as laundry detergents and cans of soup.

It was the Whitechapel Gallery in London that organized the first Pop Art exhibition in 1956. The movement was thus defined by Lawrence Alloway referring to the attraction its members felt for a culture based on cinema, comics and advertising. In addition to Alloway, other members of the self-denominated Independent Group, such as Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi and others, were also present. The group was founded in 1952 by a handful of students at the Central School of Art and Design in London.

At the same time, in the United States, a solid Pop movement was also growing, based on renewal and propelled by artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, who were searching for a new figurative language. They were later followed by other creators such as Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, Tom Wesselmann and Andy Warhol, who gave another turn of the screw in this initiative by incorporating techniques and languages that are typical of the production of consumer products.

The Hollywood “Star System,” fashion, and advertising immediately became the main sources of inspiration of these artists who looked at everything around them with the most corrosive irony. The sculptors of the Pop movement began to use waste materials to construct their works, and cinema and photography established themselves definitively as expressions of visual art. Happenings, performances, staged events . . . anything could be Art, even things that are ephemeral by their very essence, and therefore, impossible to collect. Also things that could be repeated in thousands of identical units and which came to destroy the traditional concept of Art as an exclusive asset.

The two most solid currents of Pop Art, British and American, were both born and developed simultaneously, but practically did not influence each other because their members did not maintain significant contacts. They both had an eminently urban character, and their plastic manifestations were a reflection of the new life style bowing to new technologies, fashion and consumption. Three realities that reached the highest institutionalized cultural circles, thanks to this artistic movement.