Any discussion of Pop Art should start with a tip of the cap to Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades from the Dada movement. Both took common, everyday manufactured objects and celebrated them as art. English artist Stuart Davis also painted proto-Pop Art images of cigarette packages and spark plug advertisements in the 1920s.

Since the birth of the Romantics, art had celebrated the life of common people and common places. Now a small cadre of artists, centered in New York City, turned their focus to the use of common objects and culture to help them understand a broader world. The first piece of Pop Art to reach iconic status was Richard Hamilton’s collage “Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?” Hamilton cut images from American magazines to show a “typical” American home with a Charles Atlas-type man as the father and a silicone-implanted, burlesque-queen wife on a sofa surrounded by other symbols of modern life.

You might say that Pop Art was the natural result of the plastic-based, throwaway culture that took root after World War II. When Andy Warhol’s parents were growing up, canned soup was a rather recent phenomenon. Their son became famous with his multiple paintings of identical Campbell's Soup cans arranged in rows and columns.

When Roy Lichtenstein was coming of age, comic books were a great way for young boys to waste time, but hardly considered art. Lichtenstein, himself, became a world-famous artist mimicking the Ben-Day dot technique used in these comic books. His versions only had one panel, leaving it to the viewer to imagine what came before and after.

George Segal gave a more personalized spin to the Pop Art movement, creating plaster sculptures of everyday people engaged in normal activities. They celebrated the ordinary rather than the heroic figures of previous eras.

Claes Oldenburg's monumental sculptures inspired by everyday items became popular public art installations. His "Free Stamp" sculpture beside Cleveland’s City Hall is one of his most well-known works.

With Pop Art, the everyday became art. Society and culture had changed. So had the artists who were inspired by it.