Popular Culture

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Art borrowed from mass entertainment long before Pop gave the habit a name. The woodblock prints of Edo-period Japan were produced in large editions for city audiences who wanted images of kabuki stars and famous courtesans, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's lithographed posters of the 1890s advertised Paris nightclubs on the street. Stuart Davis painted a packet of Lucky Strike cigarettes in 1921.

In postwar Britain, Eduardo Paolozzi collaged magazine advertisements into I Was a Rich Man's Plaything (1947), and Richard Hamilton's small collage Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? (1956) packed a bodybuilder, a tape recorder and a cinema sign into one room. In New York, James Rosenquist painted consumer goods at billboard scale in F-111 (1964–65), and Wayne Thiebaud lined up diner cakes in thick, creamy paint. Jeff Koons's porcelain Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988) turned celebrity into gilded ornament.