American Pop Art was a child of the newly found self-confidence with which American art had asserted itself in the fifties against European influence. The subject matter which provided the initial impulse was Americanism itself. The idea of progress, the media industry and the star-cult were experiencing a boom in Hollywood and, more especially, in New York, the cultural center of the USA. During the upheavals of the forties and fifties, the generation which preceded Pop Art brought forth a new tendency in realism using contemporary subject matter, which paved the way for the American art of the sixties.

        The development of American Pop Art occured in several phases, marking different responses by artists to the challenge of their times. The first was the pre-Pop phase, in which the painters took their leave of Abstract Expressionism. Then came the heyday of Pop Art: this phase saw the emergence of a numer of important artists whose work was rooted in the fifties and partly founded on experience acquired in commercial art, design and poster-painting. With the sponsorship of certain committed and experimental New York galleries, this phase of Pop Art quickly - despite clearly voiced protest - achieved success and recognition as a new art movement. The exhibitions were accompenied by Happenings, theater performances, counter-demonstrations and street actions.

        By the middle of the sixties Pop Art was widely known. During this phase, American Pop Art spread from New York to the West Coast and Canada, and later to Europe and Britain, which had already had its own Pop Art for some time. The last of the phases was characterized by an acerbic, radical realism, largely of American origin, whose subject was urban social relations.

        Outside New York, the earliest exponents of American Pop Art were from California. The center of West Coast Pop was Los Angeles, a city whose sub-culture not only had an enduring influence on this variant of Pop Art, but which was later to conquer the world in the form of the hippie culture and lifestyle.

        American Pop Artists: Richard Artschwager, Billy Al Bengston, Allan D'Arcangelo, Jim Dine, Joe Goode, Red Grooms, Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns, Ray Johnson, Howard Kanovitz, Edward Kienholz, Roy Lichtenstein, Marisol, Claes Oldenburg, Mel Ramos, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, James Rosenquist, Edward Ruscha, George Segal, Wayne Thiebaud, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, H. C. Westermann.