Augured in the 1950s in the work of neoDadaists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, the American incarnation of pop art, as it emerged in the 1960s, was a movement immersed in the visual languages, vernacular iconography and means of production of popular culture. Although the term was first applied to a group of British artists in the 1950s, even their work was largely based on the images of an American mass media.

Characterized by Andy Warhol’s silkscreened icons of American commodities and celebrity culture, Roy Lichtenstein’s billboard-sized homages to the graphic style and pathos of the comic strip and Claes Oldenberg’s monumental sculptures of household appliances and fixtures, pop art elevated the quotidian objects and concerns of postwar American culture into the rarified realm of high art, forever changing the meaning of that oncesanctified term.

Beyond its playful repetition of certain Dadaist strategies of quotation and appropriation and its reiteration of the Duchampian challenge to modernist autonomy and the institutions of art, pop art also evidenced a return to the thwarted political aspirations of Berlin Dada. Manifested most powerfully in James Rosenquist’s pictorial assaults on American militarism or Edward and Nancy Kienholz’s mixed-media indictments of the moral bankruptcy of American society even Warhol’s pictures ultimately oscillate between their veneer of bland complicity with and idolatrous celebration of contemporary popular culture and a more acute language of cultural critique.