Pop Art embodied the spirit of the 1960s. Despite its carnival aspects, its orgiastic colour and giant scale, it was based on a tough, no-nonsense, no-refinement standard appropriate to its time.

Here several critics, each involved in Pop Art, but with different backgrounds, vividly bring the movement to life. Lucy Lippard examines Pop’s precursors ranging from folk art, Surrealism and Dada, Stuart Davis and Léger, to the Reuben group, Assemblage, Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, and discusses Pop Art in New York best known for Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselmann, James Rosenquist and Claes Oldenburg. Lawrence Alloway contributes a chapter on the development of Pop in England; Nancy Marmer considers California Pop; Nicolas Calas, a member of the Surrealist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, assesses Pop icons, and Lucy Lippard concludes the book with a sweeping survey of Pop in Europe.