ABSTRACT
The term ‘pop art’ has been popular this year, welcomed by critics who think that the use of a slogan will confer awareness on their sluggish prose and by dealers who always prefer a trend to a single artist. But the term is not all that new in London: in the recent history of pop art I detect at least three phases. The term refers to the use of popular art sources by fine artists: movie stills, science fiction, advertisements, games boards, heroes of the mass media. In itself this is not new: one of Max Ernst's earliest paintings has the distinctive outline of Charlie Chaplin in it. In the early nineteen-fifties de Kooning called one of his women paintings ‘Marilyn Monroe’. Such use of the popular arts is incidental to the main purpose of these artists, however; it is merely one of the possibilities that can occur in the act of painting.
