By his own admission, Andy Warhol would have found Moscow of the 1960s drab and dull. "The most beautiful thing in Tokyo is McDonald's. The most beautiful thing in StockholmFlorence is McDonalds," he wrote in "The Philosophy of Andy Warhol." "Peking and Moscow don't have anything beautiful yet."

Warhol never suspected that his Russian contemporaries were finding beauty in the plain props of Soviet life and giving them the same adulatory treatment that he gave cans of Campbell's soup. Those works are featured in "Russian Pop Art," an exhibit organized by the Tretyakov Gallery's department for new currents in art, that opens Wednesday. On display will be over 250 works from the holdings of the Tretyakov, private collectors and Moscow galleries.

"Pop art is a certain set of ideas," Andrei Yerofeyev, head of the Tretyakov department behind the exhibition, said in an interview last week, dispelling the notion that Pop art is specific to American culture. Yerofeyev said that in order to be considered Pop art, a work must be figurative -- it must show an object -- and it must "speak the language of the masses." Russian Pop artists depicted doors, windows and appliances that were the stuff of domestic life in the Soviet Union.

A key figure of the genre is Mikhail Roginsky, the first Russian artist whose work was described as Pop art; the poet Genrikh Sapgir applied the term after visiting an exhibit of Roginsky's paintings in 1964. The themes Roginsky explored in the 1960s -- matchboxes, irons, electric sockets -- did not please the Soviet art elite. In fact, the exhibit Sapgir saw was shut down after a few hours. The harsh criticism led Roginsky to emigrate to Paris in 1978.

Russian Pop art was never heroic enough to meet the dictates of Socialist Realism, and its practitioners worked in obscurity. In the 1970s, these nonconformists included Boris Turetsky and Alexander Kosolapov, whose works are featured at the Tretyakov exhibit. Perhaps best known for his abstract ink drawings of the 1950s and 1960s, Turetsky shifted his focus in the early 1970s to what he called "material pictures" -- assemblages of found objects like boots, bottles and bras. Kosolapov, a sculptor, fashioned an outsized meat grinder and door latch in 1972. Later in the decade, he created a series of sculptures called "Deficit Products" that included a meter-tall rendition of the coveted chocolate-covered wafer, "Misha Kosolapy."

Yerofeyev commented that practitioners of Russian Pop art ignored the official mass culture of the Soviet period -- newspapers, propaganda, and monumental art. That became the material for Sots art, a genre created in the 1970s by Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid. Komar and Melamid's paintings put official-looking images of Lenin and Stalin in surroundings that were unorthodox and often humorous. They once staged a performance in which they made hamburgers from issues of Pravda.

The term Sots art was designed to sound like a Soviet variant of American Pop art -- a widely accepted analogy. But Yerofeyev categorically rejects this idea. "Pop art is an art of love, but Sots art is an art of subversion," he said. "It destroyed the socialist system by making a laughingstock of its foundations. It helped people overcome their fear of the authorities by laughing at them."

For this reason, Sots art will not be represented in "Russian Pop Art." But the exhibit does include several works that do not meet Yerofeyev's definition of Pop art. He refers to them as "neo-Pop art," and they represent Russian artists' attempts to process both Western Pop art and the consumer culture that has recently developed at home. "Freshness," a foam sculpture from 2003 by Sergei Shekhovtsov, shows a man applying aerosol deodorant to his underarm. The style simultaneously evokes Western advertisements and Russian avant-garde design. The piece has a sarcastic air missing from the works of Roginsky and Turetsky.

Neo-Pop art reaches its apotheosis in "Monroe-Warhol-Monroe," a new work by Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe. It is a portrait of the artist done up as Marilyn Monroe, his adopted namesake, executed in the style of Warhol's famous silk-screen prints of the actress. With a retrospective of Warhol opening simultaneously in the same building, the presence of "Monroe-Warhol-Monroe" seems to insist that Warhol and Mamyshev-Monroe can coexist in modern Moscow, rather like McDonald's and Rostik's.