This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Although Pop Art is most often associated with New York and Andy Warhol, its roots are usually traced several years earlier to London. In the early 1950s, a loose circle of artists, architects and critics calling themselves the Independent Group began meeting to discuss a subject most serious art institutions of the time ignored, American consumer culture: Hollywood films, advertising, science fiction magazines and product design, much of it encountered secondhand through imported magazines rather than direct experience. Richard Hamilton and the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi were central figures, with Paolozzi showing collages built from American advertising imagery as early as 1952. The group's ideas reached the public in 1956 with This Is Tomorrow, a landmark exhibition at London's Whitechapel Gallery, for which Hamilton created the small collage Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing, now widely regarded as one of the founding images of Pop Art. Built from clippings of a bodybuilder, a pin-up, a television, a vacuum cleaner and a canned ham label, the collage compressed the promises and absurdities of postwar consumer advertising into a single domestic scene. The following year, in a letter dated 16 January 1957 to the architects Alison and Peter Smithson, Hamilton set down what remains the movement's most quoted definition, describing the art he had in mind as: Popular (designed for a mass audience), Transient (short-term solution), Expendable (easily forgotten), Low cost, Mass produced, Young (aimed at youth), Witty, Sexy, Gimmicky, Glamorous, and Big business. Because Hamilton and the Independent Group were examining American imagery from a distance rather than living inside it, British Pop tended toward a more analytical, ironic treatment of consumer culture than the American movement that would soon eclipse it in fame, which is why Hamilton is often called the intellectual father of Pop even though his work remains far less widely known than Warhol's.