American Pop Art developed from the newly found self confidence with which American art asserted itself in the fifties against European influence. The subject matter was Americanism itself in terms of the idea of progress, the media industry, and the star cult. The previous generation had brought forth a new tendency toward realism using contemporary subject matter. The development of the style took place in several phases. The first was the pre Pop phases painters took their leave of Abstract Expressionism. Then came the heyday of Pop Art, a phase that saw the emergence of a number of important artists whose work was rooted in the fifties and partly founded on experience acquired in commercial art, design and poster painting. They quickly achieved success and recognition as a new art movement with exhibitions, Happenings, theater performances, counter demonstrations, and street actions. By the middle of the sixties Pop Art was widely known, at which time American Pop Art spread from New York to the West Coast and Canada, and later to Europe and Britain. The last of the phases was characterized by an acerbic, radical realism, largely of American origin, with the subject being urban social relations ("Pop Art in America"). Among the artists of the movement were Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, and among the issues facing these artists, in part because of their popularity and in part because of their subject matter, is the issue of art as a commodity as opposed to art as a vehicle of subjective expression.
Pop Art as in the works of Andy Warhol was a counter to the European dedication to the struggling artist as accepted by the abstract expressionists. His originality was in his denial of originality. Warhol's imagery was derived from popular material such as advertising, television, films, and so on. He applied a commercial art style to painting, and he appropriated subject matter from the pulp media. Warhol created a s...