“The Pop artists did images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second—comics, picnic tables, men’s trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles—all the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried so hard not to notice at all,” Andy Warhol once wrote. Short for “popular art,” Pop art was the dominant movement in America in the early 1960s, though the style originated in England a decade earlier. Rejecting the highly personal, gestural style of the Abstract Expressionists, the Pop artists preferred mechanical and commercial techniques (such as silkscreening) that removed any trace of the artist’s hand and subject matter that was recognizable to the masses. In the auction market, Pop art has maintained its momentum with record-breaking sales such as Warhol’s Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) (1963) at $105 million, Roy Lichtenstein’s Nurse (1964) at $76 million, and David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972) at $90 million.
