<P> Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine and Tom Wesselmann had their first shows in the Judson Gallery in 1959 and 1960 and later in 1960 through 1964 along with James Rosenquist, George Segal and others at the Green Gallery on 57th Street in Manhattan . In 1960, Martha Jackson showed installations and assemblages, New Media - New Forms featured Hans Arp, Kurt Schwitters, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Jim Dine and May Wilson . 1961 was the year of Martha Jackson's spring show, Environments, Situations, Spaces . Andy Warhol held his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles in July 1962 at Irving Blum's Ferus Gallery, where he showed 32 paintings of Campell's soup cans, one for every flavor . Warhol sold the set of paintings to Blum for $1,000; in 1996, when the Museum of Modern Art acquired it, the set was valued at $15 million . </P> <P> Donald Factor, the son of Max Factor, Jr., and an art collector and co-editor of avant garde literary magazine Nomad, wrote an essay in the magazine's last issue, Nomad / New York . The essay was one of the first on what would become known as pop art, though Factor did not use the term . The essay, "Four Artists", focused on Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, Jim Dine, and Claes Oldenburg . </P> <P> In the 1960s, Oldenburg, who became associated with the pop art movement, created many happenings, which were performance art - related productions of that time . The name he gave to his own productions was "Ray Gun Theater". The cast of colleagues in his performances included: artists Lucas Samaras, Tom Wesselman, Carolee Schneemann, Oyvind Fahlstrom and Richard Artschwager; dealer Annina Nosei; art critic Barbara Rose; and screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer . His first wife, Patty Mucha, who sewed many of his early soft sculptures, was a constant performer in his happenings . This brash, often humorous, approach to art was at great odds with the prevailing sensibility that, by its nature, art dealt with "profound" expressions or ideas . In December 1961, he rented a store on Manhattan's Lower East Side to house The Store, a month - long installation he had first presented at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York, stocked with sculptures roughly in the form of consumer goods . </P> <P> Opening in 1962, Willem de Kooning's New York art dealer, the Sidney Janis Gallery, organized the groundbreaking International Exhibition of the New Realists, a survey of new - to - the - scene American, French, Swiss, Italian New Realism, and British pop art . The fifty - four artists shown included Richard Lindner, Wayne Thiebaud, Roy Lichtenstein (and his painting Blam), Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Jim Dine, Robert Indiana, Tom Wesselmann, George Segal, Peter Phillips, Peter Blake (The Love Wall from 1961), Yves Klein, Arman, Daniel Spoerri, Christo and Mimmo Rotella . The show was seen by Europeans Martial Raysse, Niki de Saint - Phalle and Jean Tinguely in New York, who were stunned by the size and look of the American artwork . Also shown were Marisol, Mario Schifano, Enrico Baj and Öyvind Fahlström . Janis lost some of his abstract expressionist artists when Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb and Philip Guston quit the gallery, but gained Dine, Oldenburg, Segal and Wesselmann . At an opening - night soiree thrown by collector Burton Tremaine, Willem de Kooning appeared and was turned away by Tremaine, who ironically owned a number of de Kooning's works . Rosenquist recalled: "at that moment I thought, something in the art world has definitely changed". Turning away a respected abstract artist proved that, as early as 1962, the pop art movement had begun to dominate art culture in New York . </P>

Pop art took its subject matter from low-brow sources like comic books and advertising