Pop art was a visual artistic movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in England and later in the United States. Characterized by themes and techniques drawn from mass culture, such as advertising and comic books, pop art is widely interpreted as either a reaction to the then-dominant ideas of abstract expressionism or an expansion upon them. Pop art, like pop music, aimed to employ images of popular as opposed to elitist culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any given culture. Pop art at times targeted a broad audience, and often claimed to do so. However, much pop art is now considered very academic, as the unconventional organizational practices used often make it difficult for some to comprehend.

Origin of the term "pop art"

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The term was not coined in 1958 by British critic Laurence Alloway as many art historians have asserted. Lawrence Alloway clearly stated in his 1966 article that he did not use the term POP art in his earlier 1958 article The Arts As Mass Media. The concept of POP art was originally developed by the British Modern Artist John McHale, with some assistance from his friend Frank Cordell who was a leading composer and film musician well versed in the commercial popular media in Britain. John McHale coined the specific term "POP Art" in an ongoing conversation with Lawrence Alloway in London circa 1954.

The original concept of POP Art had nothing to do with a response to works by Richard Hamilton. The concept of POP Art as McHale developed it first emerged out of his experience in post war Paris where he met the Dadaist Tristan Tzara and was also exposed to Surrealism and Cubism and the leading French Existentialist writers, Symbolists, and the design ideas of Corbusier.Back in England at Nelson Teachers College in the 1940's McHale became aware of the Logical Positivists, and the Bauhaus movement. McHale then became involved with the ICA at its inception,around 1951. He introduced Alloway to the ICA and they both met Paolozzi and Reyner Banham and became firm friends. McHale was also befriended by Roland Penrose who provided him access to his extensive private collection of Surrealist collages. McHale and Alloway had been friends since the late 1940's and they would often meet at McHale's studio at #8 Randolph Mews in Maida Vale to discuss aesthetics and film theory. Turnbull often dropped by the studio, as did Albert Tucker the influential Australian artist and theorist and famous "Angry Penguin". It was out of this milieu that McHale evolved his Pop art ideas.

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In 1765, John Singleton Copley sent his painting Henry Pelham (Boy with a Squirrel) from Boston to London in hopes of receiving feedback from the arbiters of academic aesthetics. Several months later, he received the welcome news that Sir Joshua Reynolds had called the painting "wonderfull." In virtually every scholarly narrative of early American art, Boy with a Squirrel derives its canonical significance from this famous transatlantic relay. But the most basic reality of that relay–the massive fact of the Atlantic Ocean standing between Copley and his interlocutors–has barely been registered in the scholarship.This essay interprets Boy with a Squirrel in terms of the difficulty and delicacy of its transatlantic transmission. I argue that Copley, as he attempted to create a painting that would have the necessary transitive qualities, drew from an array of familiar discourses of Atlantic exchange and transport. The painting's profile format evoked strategies of numismatic exchange. The precise representation of the flying squirrel tapped into well-established transatlantic natural history circuits. The spatial transformations of the composition echoed not only empiricist theories of sensory conveyance (especially the writings of George Berkeley), but also mirrored the workaday dynamics of the shipping and reassembly of transatlantic commodities. Copley, like many other colonial artists, worked in a global community governed by distance, difference, and delay. By attending to the vehicular context of Boy with a Squirrel, we can begin to understand his strategies for articulating–and navigating–that new global space.

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