Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the United Kingdom and the United States during the mid-to-late 1950s. The movement presented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular and mass culture, such as advertising, comic books, and mundane mass-produced objects. One of its aims is to use images of popular (as opposed to elitist) culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any culture, most often through the use of irony.
In pop art, material is sometimes visually removed from its known context, isolated, or combined with unrelated material. The concept of pop art refers not as much to the art itself as to the attitudes that led to it. It is widely interpreted as a reaction to the then-dominant ideas of abstract expressionism, as well as an expansion of those ideas. Artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein became icons of this era, blurring the lines between high art and commercial design.