Origin of the name Pop Art

It was called Pop Art because the subject of the art was popular. The term Pop Art (popular art) was firstly used in mass media by Lawrence Alloway, who was an English art critic and curator who worked in the United States from the 1960s. He first used the term "mass popular art" in the mid-1950s and used the term Pop Art in the 1960s to indicate that art has a basis in the popular culture of its day and takes from it a faith in the power of images. Alloway, alongside the artists Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi, was among the founding members of the Independent Group, a collective of artists, architects, and writers who explored radical approaches to contemporary visual culture during their meetings at ICA in London between 1952 and 1955. They became the forerunners to British Pop art. At their first meeting Paolozzi gave a visual lecture entitled ‘Bunk’ (short for ‘bunkum’ meaning nonsense) which took an ironic look at the all-American lifestyle. This was illustrated by a series collages created from American magazines that he received from GI’s still resident in Paris in the late 1940s. ‘I was a Rich Man’s Plaything’, one of the ‘Bunk’ series, was the first visual artwork to include the word ‘POP’.

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