Pop Art Timeline

It was around 1958–1959 that Enrico Baj and Mimmo Rotella abandoned their previous careers, which might be generically defined as belonging to a non-representational genre despite being thoroughly post-Dadaist, to catapult themselves into a new world of images springing up all around them.

Image source: Mimmo Rotella

The Japanese Gutai movement led to a 1958 Gutai exhibition at Martha Jackson's New York gallery that preceded by two years her famous New Forms New Media show that put pop art on the map, connecting Japanese avant-garde practice with the New York scene.

Nouveau réalisme refers to an artistic movement founded in 1960 by the art critic Pierre Restany and the artist Yves Klein during the first collective exposition in the Apollinaire gallery in Milan. The movement's engagement with everyday objects paralleled and influenced pop art.

Pierre Restany wrote the original manifesto titled the "Constitutive Declaration of New Realism" in April 1960, proclaiming "Nouveau Réalisme—new ways of perceiving the real." It was signed on 27 October 1960 in Yves Klein's workshop by nine people including Klein, Arman, Raysse, Spoerri, Tinguely, Dufrêne, Hains, and de la Villeglé; César, Rotella, Saint Phalle, and Deschamps joined later.

Also in the category of Spanish pop art is the "Chronicle Team" (El Equipo Crónica), which existed in Valencia between 1964 and 1981, formed by the artists Manolo Valdés and Rafael Solbes, bringing politically engaged pop imagery to Spain.

In Italy, by 1964 pop art was known and took different forms, such as the "Scuola di Piazza del Popolo" in Rome, with pop artists such as Mario Schifano, Franco Angeli, Giosetta Fioroni, Tano Festa, Claudio Cintoli, and some artworks by Piero Manzoni, Lucio Del Pezzo, Mimmo Rotella, and Valerio Adami.

Image source: Fasci Italiani di Combattimento

Evelyne Axell from Namur was a prolific pop artist in the 1964–1972 period, contributing a distinctive Belgian voice to the international pop art movement before her early death.

Image source: Evelyne Axell

After a decade of influential activity that ran parallel to and intersected with pop art, Nouveau réalisme was dissolved in 1970, closing a chapter on one of Europe's key movements engaging everyday objects and mass culture.

Image source: Nouveau réalisme

A note about the cover image in the January 1958 issue of Art News pointed out that Jasper Johns' first one-man show marked a significant moment for the young artist whose work bridged Abstract Expressionism and the emerging sensibility that would feed into pop art.

Image source: Jasper Johns

In 1959 and 1960, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, and Tom Wesselmann had early shows at the Judson Gallery in New York, presenting experimental work that helped set the stage for the emergence of American pop art.

Image source: Claes Oldenburg

Around the same time, Martha Jackson Gallery presented experimental assemblage and installation work in New Media – New Forms (1960), featuring artists such as Hans Arp, Kurt Schwitters, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Oldenburg, and Dine, putting pop art on the map in New York.

In 1961, Martha Jackson organized Environments, Situations, Spaces, further advancing immersive and object-based art practices that helped set the stage for pop art's embrace of everyday materials and consumer imagery.

Image source: Martha Jackson

Apple and Hockney traveled together to New York during the Royal College's 1961 summer break, which is when Apple first made contact with Andy Warhol. Both later moved to the United States, and Apple became involved with the New York pop art scene, quickly becoming an iconic international artist of the 1960s.

Image source: Billy Apple

In December 1961, Claes Oldenburg opened The Store on Manhattan's Lower East Side, a month-long installation of handmade sculptures resembling consumer goods, blurring the line between art object and commodity.

Image source: Claes Oldenburg

Also in 1962, the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York organized the landmark International Exhibition of the New Realists, bringing together American pop artists with European nouveaux réalistes and cementing transatlantic connections between the movements.

In July 1962, Andy Warhol held his first solo exhibition at Irving Blum's Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, exhibiting 32 Campbell's Soup Cans. The show became one of the most iconic moments in the history of pop art.

Image source: Campbell's Soup Cans

In an August 1962 review of an exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, The New York Times noted the emergence of what was then being called "Pop" or "Environmental" art within a survey of contemporary American work drawn from major Connecticut collections.

Image source: Wadsworth Atheneum

The term "pop art" was officially introduced in December 1962; the occasion was a "Symposium on Pop Art" organized by the Museum of Modern Art, giving the movement formal critical recognition.

Image source: Museum of Modern Art

Roy Lichtenstein used oil and Magna paint in his best known works, such as Drowning Girl (1963), which was appropriated from the lead story in DC Comics' Secret Hearts #83. His paintings of 1962–64 combined expressive brushwork with silkscreened magazine clippings from Life, Newsweek, and National Geographic.

Image source: Drowning Girl

Referred to as the "innovator of pop art" by The Observer in 1964, Andy Warhol is widely regarded as the central figure of the movement, transforming celebrity, consumer goods, and media imagery into iconic artworks.

Image source: Andy Warhol

In 1964, the Bianchini Gallery staged The American Supermarket, transforming the exhibition space into a functioning grocery store stocked with artist-made consumer goods by Warhol, Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, Wesselmann, and others—an immersive demonstration of pop art's fusion of art and commerce.

By 1963, major New York institutions had embraced the movement, marking pop art's transition from experimental galleries to mainstream institutional recognition and support.

Alloway clarified these terms in 1966, at which time pop art had already transited from art schools and small galleries to a major force in the artworld, confirming the movement's established status.

By the mid-1960s, pop artists had secured sustained commercial and institutional support, and by 1968 the São Paulo exhibition Environment U.S.A.: 1957–1967 presented a comprehensive survey of the movement's leading figures, signaling its consolidation as a dominant force in contemporary art.