British Pop Art arose of a new understanding of contemporary life. It was intellectual, interdisciplinary and programatic in character.

In the early fifties artists and intellectuals began to realize that their culture was increasingly determined by the mass media, by new technology and by social change, and that this process was also leading to the increased Americanization of Europe. This cultural transformation was not reflected in the introverted, expressive, abstract-figurative art of the older generation of British artists, such as Henry Moore or Graham Sutherland. It was, however, with these new conditions in mind that the Independent Group was convened in 1952 to hold informal discussions and cultural events at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.

The topics discussed at their meetings can be listed as follows: the expansion of artistic techniques beyond traditional forms of representation, action painting, helicopter design, car-body design, nuclear biology, cybernetics (a new science at the time), folk culture, the mass media and municipal culture, machine aesthetics, advertising, the cinema, comics, science-fiction, pop music, fashion and the theories of Marshall McLuhan. These themes were indeed remote from the preoccupations of the cultural establishment of the time!

The influence of Pop Art spread quickly, both in geographical terms (Cambridge University) and among the younger generation. It was due to young painters' influence that British Pop Art responded with such intensity to American imagery and the early phase of American Pop Art. This phase of British Pop Art developed and made its presence publicly felt for the first time at the exhibition Young Contemporaries in 1960 - the first exhibition to provide a general survey of the new art movement. British Pop Art stepped outside the traditional boundaries of artistic development to tread the path of self-analysis within a consciously perceived and reflected present-day existence.