Pop Art and after

After the poured canvases and the great colour fields, the most conspicuous thing a painter could do was stop making marks altogether. Pop is the moment when the artist’s handwriting is deliberately withdrawn and replaced by the impersonal surface of a printing press. That single reversal is the most useful fact in this whole period: for a century before 1960, the hand is the evidence; from 1960 onwards, its absence is.

Pop in Britain: a view from outside

Pop began in London before it began in New York, and it began as talk. The Independent Group met at the Institute of Contemporary Arts between 1952 and 1955 — Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi, Nigel Henderson, the critic Lawrence Alloway, the architects Alison and Peter Smithson — to discuss American advertising, science fiction, car styling and film as serious material. Britain was still coming out of rationing. American abundance was something seen in imported magazines rather than lived, and that distance gives British Pop its particular flavour: analytical, ironic, a little anthropological.

The visual tells follow from the circumstances. British Pop of the fifties is small, often the size of a sheet of paper, and made by collage — cut and pasted printed matter rather than paint imitating print. Hamilton’s Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? (1956) assembles a bodybuilder with a lollipop marked POP, a tinned ham, a tape recorder and a vacuum-cleaner advertisement into a modern sitting room. Paolozzi had been making scrapbook collages from American magazines since the late 1940s.

Peter Blake is the warmer strand: badges, pin-ups, fairground and music-hall lettering, real scraps fixed to board, a faded rather than saturated palette, and genuine affection for the material. That sensibility took him to the Sgt. Pepper sleeve in 1967. Later British Pop — Allen Jones, the young David Hockney — is more knowing and more painterly, and Hockney in particular slides quickly out of Pop into flat Californian light by 1964.

Pop in America: the machine finish

American Pop arrives around 1961 and looks different at ten paces: big, bright, flat and made to look manufactured.

Andy Warhol adopted photographic silkscreen in 1962. A photograph is converted into a stencil and ink is squeegeed through a mesh onto canvas, so images can be repeated endlessly and the result carries no touch at all. He kept the accidents — off-register colour, patchy ink, blotches — precisely because they read as machine error rather than expressive incident. Repetition in a grid, whether of soup cans, Marilyn or a car crash, is the single strongest Warhol tell, and it makes a point about how mass media wears out a shocking image by reprinting it.

Roy Lichtenstein took the opposite route to the same impersonality: he painted, by hand, the appearance of cheap four-colour printing. Heavy black keylines, a palette held to red, yellow, blue and black, and regular fields of Ben-Day dots — the halftone dots of comic-book presses — enlarged far past the scale at which anyone would notice them. Nothing is brushy; the whole surface pretends to be a printing plate.

Claes Oldenburg worked in three dimensions, inverting the conventions of monument: a hamburger or an ice cream, made enormous, in painted canvas stuffed with foam, so that the thing collapses under its own weight. These soft sculptures of the early 1960s are funny before they are anything else, which is part of the argument. James Rosenquist, who had actually painted billboards, gives you fragments of commercial imagery at billboard scale, cropped so hard they turn abstract.

The shared principle is worth stating plainly: Pop makes commercial technique the subject. Not just the images of advertising and comics but their production methods — silkscreen, halftone dots, packaging typography, billboard scale. The picture announces it came off a press.

A fast tour of what came after

Each of the following has one or two tells that are reliable enough to use cold.

Minimalism (New York, mid-1960s; Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Robert Morris, Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt). Look for industrial fabrication — the artist specified it, a workshop built it — modular repetition at equal intervals with no compositional hierarchy, unaltered material (galvanised steel, plywood, firebrick, fluorescent tube), and titles that refuse to help, usually Untitled. The claim is that the object refers to nothing beyond itself and your own body standing near it.

Conceptual art (from about 1966; Kosuth, Art & Language, Weiner, Piper). The idea is the work; the objects are its documentation. So it looks administrative: typescripts, index cards, certificates, maps, deadpan photographs, instructions to be carried out by others. Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs (1965) puts a chair, a photograph of it and a dictionary definition side by side. If the visual interest is deliberately low and the wall label carries the weight, you are here.

Land art (from about 1968; Smithson, Heizer, De Maria, and in Britain Richard Long and Hamish Fulton). The work is out in the terrain, so what reaches you is a photograph, a map or a film. Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) in the Great Salt Lake is the emblem; Long’s walked lines are the quieter British version, recorded as a photograph and a plain caption. The trap is mistaking the documentation for a photographic artwork.

The YBAs (from the Goldsmiths-organised Freeze show, 1988; Hirst, Emin, Lucas, Whiteread, the Chapmans). They kept Conceptual art’s thinking but reattached it to objects with immediate physical charge — a shark in formaldehyde, a cast of the air inside a house, an unmade bed — plus a title that works as a headline. Charles Saatchi’s collecting and the Sensation exhibition of 1997 are part of the identification, since the publicity was never incidental to the work.

Contemporary practice since roughly 1990 is genuinely harder to date by form, because installation, video and photography became the shared international language and nothing about the medium marks a decade. What you can still use: video before 1970 is rare and low-resolution, cathode-ray monitors on plinths suggest the 1970s to 1990s, and high-definition projection on a wall points to after about 2000. Beyond that, place it by concern — identity, archive, post-colonial history, ecology, the digital — and by production values, which since the biennale boom of the 1990s can be enormous.

How to spot it in ten seconds

1. Ask whether you can see the artist’s hand. Visible gesture pushes you back before 1960; a deliberately mechanical surface pulls you after it.
2. If it looks printed, find out how. Dots and black keylines mean Lichtenstein; a repeated photographic image with off-register colour means Warhol; actual pasted cuttings mean British Pop of the 1950s.
3. Check the scale and the sweetness. Small, hand-made, ironic and collaged is London; large, saturated and slick is New York.
4. If it is an object, ask who made it. Factory-made identical units in a row means Minimalism. Hand-stuffed canvas food means Oldenburg.
5. If there is a lot of text and little to look at, think Conceptual art from about 1966.
6. If you are looking at a photograph of a landscape intervention, treat it as documentation of Land art, not as a photograph.
7. If the material itself is the shock and the title is a joke, think YBA, 1988 onwards.
8. If it is a room-sized installation with a projection, stop trying to date it by style and date it by technology and theme instead.
9. Finally, beware the long career. Hockney at 25 is Pop-adjacent and at 80 is making iPad landscapes; Richter paints photorealist blur and squeegeed abstraction in the same decades. The picture dates itself, not the name.