Pop Art was one of the United States' major artistic movements of the 20th century - aside from Abstract Expressionism, it was probably the biggest. It actually was first coined in Britain in 1955 but unsurprisingly the Americans took up the consumerist cause with much greater effect and conviction, and became the pioneers of the movement. Pop Art and pop culture refers to the products of the mass media evolving in the late 1950s and 60s and also to the works of art that draw upon popular culture - packaging, television, advertisements, comic books, the cinema. Pop Art was the medium that made real the breaking down of barriers that had existed for hundreds of hears between high (old-fashioned) art and mass culture.
