The ‘Pop Art’ movement that developed in Britain and America in the 1960s were two different groups with different aims. British artists such as Paolozzi, Hamilton and Hockney were infatuated with US popular culture which was poles apart from ration-book Britain. They loved optimistic, brightly coloured imagery, a conscious move away from drab and tradition-laden post-war Britain.

British Pop Art tended on the whole to be more narrative than its American counterpart. The Pop that developed in the USA grew from dissatisfaction with Abstract Expressionism and out of a feeling that abstract art was becoming self-indulgent and divorced from life.

Even so, artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and especially Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg still retained close links with the visual grammar and compositional structures of American abstract artists such as Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock.