In 1956 Britain, post-war rationing had only just ended and advertising and American consumer culture were pouring in like a flood. The critic Lawrence Alloway gave this new art that embraced mass-market goods a name: Pop Art.

In the 1960s it crossed the ocean to New York, pushed to its peak by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg. Warhol painted Campbell's soup cans 32 times, reprinted Marilyn Monroe like wallpaper, and opened a studio called The Factory — saying, 'In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.'

Lichtenstein, meanwhile, blew comic panels up into oil paintings, keeping even the Benday halftone dots — so a single canvas looked like one of a million printed copies. Pop Art's real contribution was this: it declared that 'art can grow straight off the supermarket shelf.'