pop art

American  

Or Pop Art

noun

1. an art movement that began in the U.S. in the 1950s and reached its peak of activity in the 1960s, chose as its subject matter the anonymous, everyday, standardized, and banal iconography in American life, as comic strips, billboards, commercial products, and celebrity images, and dealt with them typically in such forms as outsize commercially smooth paintings, mechanically reproduced silkscreens, large-scale facsimiles, and soft sculptures.

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pop art British  

noun

1. a movement in modern art that imitates the methods, styles, and themes of popular culture and mass media, such as comic strips, advertising, and science fiction

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pop art Cultural  

1. Art that uses elements of popular culture, such as magazines, movies, popular music, and even bottles and cans. (See also Andy Warhol.)

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Other Word Forms

• pop artist
  noun

Etymology

Origin of pop art

First recorded in 1960–65

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

pop art

A pioneer in the pop art movement in the 1960s, Hockney established himself as a globally renowned painter and master draughtsman and kept painting, experimenting and exhibiting right up until his death.

From Barron's ● Jun. 12, 2026

His restless intellect and self-confidence propelled him toward color-soaked figurative work and not the abstract expressionism or pop art of many of his peers.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 12, 2026

As well as being "one of the most important pop artists," she explained, he was also a "bit of an organiser", being behind an exhibition in 1961 which launched British pop art.

From BBC ● May 17, 2026

It’s sort of like if Andy Warhol slapped his name on a can of Campbell’s soup — Warhol x Campbell’s Chicken & Stars — instead of painting them as pop art.

From Salon ● Apr. 20, 2026

It operates at the intersections of pop art and high-ish art, of the sacred and profane, of radicalism and die-hardism.

From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 1, 2025