In the late 1950’s, Jasper Johns emerged as force in the American art scene. His richly worked paintings of maps, flags, and targets led the artistic community away from Abstract Expressionism toward a new emphasis on the concrete. Johns laid the groundwork for both Pop Art and Minimalism. Today, as his prints and paintings set record prices at auction, the meanings of his paintings, his imagery, and his changing style continue to be subjects of controversy. (pbs.org)

The Seasons (Summer) Jasper Johns etching with aquatint.

Together with Rauschenberg and several Abstract Expressionistpainters of the previous generation, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Barnett Newman, Johns is one of most significant and influential American painters of the twentieth century. He also ranks withDürer, Rembrandt, Goya, Munch, and Picasso as one of the greatestprintmakers of any era. In addition, he makes many drawings—unique works on paper, usually based on a painting he has previously painted—and he has created an unusual body of sculptural objects. (metmuseum.org)

Andy Warhol

From autumn 1962 Warhol’s paintings were made almost exclusively by screenprinting photographic images on to backgrounds painted either in a single colour or in flat interlocking areas that corresponded approximately to the contours of the superimposed images. In these works, executed with the help of assistants in the studio that he called The Factory, he succeeded in removing his hand even more decisively from the canvas and in challenging the concept of the unique art work by repeating the same mechanically produced image until it appeared to be drained of all meaning. Among the most successful of these were portraits of glamorous film stars such as the recently deceased Marilyn Monroe, whose masklike face acquires an iconic quality in works such as Marilyn Diptych (for illustration see Pop Art), and gruesome images of car crashes and other daily disasters as seen in photographs reproduced in mass-circulation newspapers, such as Green Disaster Ten Times (1963; Frankfurt am Main, Mus. Mod. Kst). (moma.org)

Campbell's Soup Cans, Warhol 

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American painter Roy Lichtenstein work is instantly recognisable and name is synonymous with Pop Art. As a master of appropriation, he applied a refined strategic approach to his creative energies and constructed all his work following a sophisticated process of image selection, reinterpretation and reissue. Lichtenstein developed a central creative principle that became a potent formula: an ability to identify cultural clichés and to repackage them as monumental remixes. (abc.net.au)