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Eric Shanes

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Herausgeber: Parkstone International
Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
Sprache: Englisch
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

This book offers a radically new perspective on the so-called ‘Pop Art’ creative dynamic that has been around since the 1950s. It does so by enhancing the term ‘Pop Art’ which has always been recognised as a misnomer, for it obscures far more than it clarifies. Instead, the book connects all the art in question to mass-culture which has always provided its core inspiration. Above all, the book suggests that this Mass-Culture Art has created a new Modernist tradition which is still flourishing. The book traces that tradition down the forty and more years since Pop/Mass-Culture Art first came into being in the 1950s, and locates it within its larger historical context. Naturally the book discusses the major contributors to the Pop/Mass-Culture Art tradition right down to the present, in the process including a number of artists who have never previously been connected with so-called ‘Pop Art’ but who have always been primarily interested in mass-culture, and who are therefore partially or totally connected with Pop/Mass-Culture Art. The book reproduces in colour and discusses in great detail over 150 of the key works of the Pop/Mass-Culture Art tradition. Often this involves the close reading of images whose meaning has largely escaped understanding previously. The result is a book that qualitatively is fully on a level with Eric Shanes’s other best-selling and award-winning writings.

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Leseprobe

Text: Eric Shanes

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Art © Estate of Allan D’Arcangelo/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Art © Estate of Duane Hanson/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Art © Mel Ramos/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Art © Robert Rauschenberg/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Art © Estate of Larry Rivers/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Art © James Rosenquist/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Art © Wayne Thiebaud/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Art © Estate of Tom Wesselmann/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Art © Estate of Grant Wood/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

American Gothic, 1930 by Grant Wood

No part of this publication may be reproduced or adapted without the permission of the copyrights holder, throughout the world. Unless otherwise specified, copyright on the works reproduced lies with the respective photographers. Despite intensive research, it has not always been possible to establish copyright ownership. Where this is the case we would appreciate notification

ISBN: 978-1-78310-749-0

Eric Shanes

The

POPART

Tradition

Responding to Mass-Culture

Contents

FOREWORD

POP / MASS-CULTURE ART

Forerunners of Pop/Mass-Culture Art

Early Pop/Mass-Culture Art in Britain

The Rise of Pop/Mass-Culture Art in America

The Triumph of Pop/Mass-Culture Art

Some Individual Artists and their Creative Development

Jasper Johns

Robert Rauschenberg

Claes Oldenburg

Roy Lichtenstein

Andy Warhol

James Rosenquist

Jim Dine

George Segal

Ed Kienholz

Some Further American Pop/Mass-Culture Artists

Meanwhile, back in Europe…

David Hockney

Allen Jones and Others

Photorealism and Mass-Culture

Duane Hanson, Sandy Skoglund and Ed Paschke

Keith Haring, Jeff Koons and Mark Kostabi

Arman

Martial Raysse, Mimmo Rotella, Erró and Others

Haim Steinbach, Ashley Bickerton and Others

British Sculptors and Mass-Culture

A Necessary Change of Name

The Cultural Status of Pop/Mass-Culture Art?

THE PLATES

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Andy Warhol,Campbell’s soup (Turkey Noodle), 1962. Silkscreen ink on canvas, 51 x 40.6 cm. Sonnabend collection.

FOREWORD

Since the late-1950s a new tradition has emerged in Western art. Although its initial phase lasting between about 1958 and 1970 was quickly dubbed ‘Pop Art’, that label has always been recognised as a misnomer, for often it has served to obscure far more than it clarified. If anything, the tradition incepted in the late-1950s should be named ‘Mass-Culture Art’, for when the British critic Lawrence Alloway coined the phrase ‘Pop’ in 1958, he was not applying the term to any art yet in existence, let alone to a rebellious youth-orientated ‘Pop’ culture which was only then in its infancy but which use of the word ‘Pop’ now tends to suggest (and to do so in an increasingly dated manner). Instead, he was writing about those rapidly increasing numbers of people across the entirety of western society whose very multitudinousness and shared values were causing new forms of cultural expression to come into existence and for whom increasing affluence, leisure and affordable technology were permitting the enjoyment of mass-culture. As we shall see, the central preoccupation of so-called Pop Art has always been the effects and artefacts of mass-culture, so to call the tradition Mass-Culture Art is therefore more accurate (although to avoid art-historical confusion, the term ‘Pop’ has been retained as a prefix throughout this book). Moreover, mass-culture in all its rich complexity has inspired further generations of artists whom we would never link with Pop Art, thus making it vital we should characterise the tradition to which both they and the 1960s Pop Artists equally contributed as Mass-Culture Art, for otherwise it might prove well-nigh impossible to discern any connection between these groups of artists separated by time and place. The aims of this book are therefore fourfold: to cut across familiar distinctions regarding what is or is not ‘Pop Art’ by enhancing the latter term; to explore the tradition of Pop/Mass-Culture Art and its causes; to discuss its major contributors; and to examine a representative number of works by those artists in detail.

Edgar Degas,In a Café, c. 1876. Oil on canvas, 92 x 68 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

POP / MASS-CULTURE ART

The rise of popular mass-culture was historically inevitable, as was the advent of an eventual response to it in art. We are still living through the modern technological and democratic epoch that began with the British Industrial Revolution and the American and French Revolutions of the late-eighteenth century. As industrialisation and democratisation have spread, increasing numbers of people have gradually come to share in their benefits: political participation, rewarding labour, heightened individualism, and better housing, health, literacy, and social and physical mobility. Yet at the same time a high price has frequently been paid for these advances: a political manipulation often rooted in profound cynicism and self-interest; vast economic exploitation; globalisation and the diminution of national, regional or local identity; meaningless and unfulfilling labour for large numbers; growing urbanisation; the industrialisation of rural areas, which has grossly impinged upon the natural world; industrial pollution; and the widespread loss of spiritual certainty which has engendered a compensatory explosion of irrationalism, superstition, religious fanaticism and fringe cults, hyper-nationalism, quasi-political romanticism and primitive or industrialised mass-murder, as well as materialism, consumerism, conspicuous consumption and media hero-worship. All of these and manifold other developments have necessarily involved the institutions, industrial processes and artefacts created during this epoch, although not until the emergence of Pop/Mass-Culture Art in the late-1950s did artists focus exclusively upon the cultural tendencies, processes and artefacts of the era.

When Lawrence Alloway wrote of ‘Pop’ in 1958, he belonged to a circle within the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London called the Independent Group. Its members were artists, designers, architects and critics who had come to recognise that by the mid-twentieth century the enormous growth of popular mass-culture and its characteristic forms of communication needed to be addressed – it was not enough snobbishly to consign such matters to the dustbin of lowbrow taste. Naturally, it is only in the modern technological epoch that those wishing to appeal to the growing numbers of consumers of the products of industrialisation have increasingly possessed the large-scale means of doing so. The newspaper printing press, the camera, the radio, celluloid and the film projector, the television set and other mass-communicative technologies right down to those of our own time that make their predecessors look exceedingly primitive (and which supplant their forerunners with increasing rapidity), have each produced fresh types of responses and thus new kinds of visual imagery, all of which obviously constitute highly fertile ground for the artist and designer to explore. Moreover, popular mass-culture possesses energy and potency, and very often its means of transmission such as the cinematic or televisual image, the advertisement, and the poster and magazine illustration, enjoys an immediacy of communication that is not shared by works of greater intellectual complexity: you have to labour a little harder to appreciate, say, the plays of Shakespeare, the symphonies of Beethoven and the canvases of Rembrandt than you do the average Hollywood movie, pop record or billboard poster. So in the 1950s, a decade which saw recovery from war and a growing sense of materialistic well-being in the western world, the Independent Group’s suggestion that artists and designers should draw upon the energy, potency and immediacy of mass-culture proved most timely. Indeed, the very relevance of their notions explains why so many other creative figures further afield soon arrived at exactly the same conclusions independently of the British group and, indeed, even of each other.

Because of this unconnected arrival at the same conclusions, in the main Pop/Mass-Culture Art was never a movement as such, for although in Britain some of the artists who followed its ethos exchanged ideas during the period of its inception, that was not the case in the United States where very few of the participatory artists were ever in close contact with one another. It is therefore perhaps more accurate to describe Pop/Mass-Culture Art as a cultural dynamic rather than a movement. Certainly it was one made ready by historical factors to be born in the late-1950s, although it had been preceded by many forerunners.

Edward Hopper,People in the Sun, 1960. Oil on canvas, 102.6 x 153.4 cm. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

Forerunners of Pop/Mass-Culture Art

Naturally, large numbers of artists, right up to the mid-twentieth century, had dealt with humanity en masse. Among those who did so most memorably were the eighteenth to nineteenth-century painters Francisco de Goya, J.M.W. Turner and David Wilkie, all three of whom often depicted ordinary people at work and play. The latter two also created consciously ‘low-life’ subjects by representing the common people in their humble dwellings, pubs and at village fairs, thereby revitalising a tradition going back to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century painters such as Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Adrian van Ostade and David Teniers the Younger. Later in the nineteenth century Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas, among others, also looked to the life of common humanity for inspiration, as in the latter artist’s superb study of alienation, In a caféof around 1876. This depicts a seemingly hard-hearted man and brutalised woman mentally isolated from one another and spatially separated from us. And Degas was a major influence upon two important painters who addressed popular culture directly: Walter Sickert and Edward Hopper.

Sickert openly followed in the footsteps of Degas the painter of mass-entertainments such as café-concerts and circus life by portraying music-hall scenes and pier-side amusements; later in life he developed scores of canvases from newspaper photos in which he emulated the blurring and graininess of the newsprint almost as much as he represented the images it originally projected. Hopper was inspired by Degas (especially In a Café, which he knew through a 1924 book reproduction) to open up the entire subject of urban loneliness, anomie and alienation, those negative effects of mass-society and mass-culture. Towards the end of his life, in People in the Sun, he even addressed the hedonistic mass sun-worship that has become such a central feature of modern existence.

In People in the Sun Hopper’s sunbathers typify a cultural trend. Another artist to create such typifications, but much earlier and with far more satirical bite, was Grant Wood who in 1930 created arguably his most renowned image, American Gothic (see opposite). Here an apparently typical mid-western farmer dressed in denim stands alongside his wife clad in homespun. Behind them is their simple dwelling, with its gothic-inspired arched window. Together they embody the God-fearing, puritanical values of Middle America. Similarly, in 1932 Wood gave us Daughters of Revolution (see above) in which three daunting matrons doubtless belonging to a neo-conservative organisation, the Daughters of the American Revolution, stand before a revered icon of their nationalism, Emanuel Leutze’s 1851 canvas, Washington Crossing the Delaware.

Grant Wood,American Gothic, 1930. Oil on board, 73.6 x 60.5 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. AmericanGothic, 1930 by Grant Wood. All rights reserved by the Estate of Nan Wood Graham/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Pablo Picasso,Guitar, sheet-music and glass, 1912. Pasted papers, gouache and charcoal on paper, 48 x 36.5 cm. Marion Koogler McNay Art Institute, San Antonio, Texas.

Like earlier painters of ‘low’ humanity such as Wilkie, Degas and Hopper, Wood represented ordinary life as it is lived, rather than as it is indirectly reflected through the prism of the mass-communications media. Undoubtedly the first artists to treat of the associations of those media and of the popular mass-culture they served were Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. In 1911 Braque started imitating stencilled lettering in his paintings. This necessarily invokes associations of mass-production, for stencilled lettering is very ‘low culture’ indeed, being primarily found on the sides of packing crates and the like where identifications need to be effected quickly and without any aesthetic refinement whatsoever. By pasting newspapers and the sheet-music of popular songs into his images around 1912-13, Picasso not only virtually invented collage as a new creative vehicle but necessarily opened up the links between art and the mass-communications media.

Picasso’s new artistic channel, as illustrated in Guitar, Sheet-music and Glass (see opposite), prompted large numbers of other artists such as Georg Grosz, Raoul Hausmann and Kurt Schwitters to incorporate photographs, scientific diagrams, maps and the like into their images. One or two of these works, such as a Schwitters collage of 1947, would even include comic-strip images. Another German artist, John Heartfield, invented a new art form, the photo-collage, in which much of the material was taken from newspapers. As a result it necessarily included humanity en masse.

Heartfield began to open up this new visual territory using pre-existent material from the early-1920s onwards, and by that time a French-born painter resident in the United States since 1915, Marcel Duchamp, had already created a number of ‘ready-mades’ or sculptures that appropriated industrially mass-produced objects. Whether used alone or in amalgamation with each other, such artefacts not only created new overall forms but simultaneously typified aspects of industrialised society. Perhaps the most notorious of these ‘ready-mades’ was Fountain of 1917, which was simply a ceramic urinal purchased from a hardware store. Duchamp intended to exhibit the work in a vast New York exhibition he had been instrumental in setting up in 1917. A major motivation underlying this show was democratic access (all the thousands of works submitted to it were automatically displayed), and this at a time when democracy was very much in the news because of impending American entry into the First World War. Ultimately Duchamp’s wittily-titled pisspot made a wholly valid point about shared human activity, for all people everywhere have need of urinals from time-to-time. Democracy indeed.

According to Duchamp (or initially at least), a major reason he had chosen to exhibit such an article was to raise it to the status of an art-object by forcing us to recognise the inherent beauty of a mass-produced artefact which normally provokes no aesthetic response whatsoever. This was a doubly clever ploy, for although Fountain was probably destroyed in the early 1920s because Duchamp set no value upon it, the piece certainly got him talked about, an increasingly vital requirement for any artist in the age of mass-communications. (Later, in the 1950s, Duchamp denied he had wanted his objet trouvé to give pleasure to the eye, while simultaneously he created a number of replicas of the artefact to sell to museums clamouring to own such an infamous attack upon art. Like many a creative figure before and since, he therefore had his cake and ate it). Ultimately Duchamp’s Fountain, like his other ‘ready-mades’, completely broke down the distinction between the work of art as crafted object and the work of art as mass-produced artefact. In doing so it necessarily democratised the entire notion of being an artist, for by means of the selfsame process by which a urinal became Fountain – ‘it is a work of art simply because I proclaim it to be such’ – thereafter anyone could become an artist (and quite a few have followed that course ever since). For better or for worse, but mainly for the latter, the democratisation that stands at the very heart of the modern technological, mass-cultural epoch perhaps inevitably began to flood into the field of the visual arts on a massive scale with Duchamp’s ‘ready-mades’, and especially with Fountain.

Apart from any aesthetic thinking, sensory pleasures and moral outrage Duchamp’s object undeniably sparked in 1917 (and still generates by means of its museum replicas), the manner in which it had originally come into being made it automatically act as a signifier of mass-production more generally. Such a process of objects functioning as signifiers would become central to Pop/Mass-Culture Art, as we shall see. But Fountain was not the only precursor in this sphere. From the mid-1910s onwards, and directly as a result of the influence of Picasso’s Cubist explorations, artists often depicted objects taken from mass-culture, not to demonstrate their cleverness in emulating the appearances of things, but instead to draw upon the familiarity of the objects they represented as national or cultural signifiers.

Kurt Schwitters,For Käte, 1947. Paper collage, 10.5 x 13 cm. Pasadena Art Museum, California.

Marcel Duchamp,Fountain, 1917. Photograph by Alfred Steiglitz from The Blind Man, May 1917. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Louise and Walter Arensberg collection.

To take national signification first, in 1914-15 (and thus during the First World War) the American painter Marsden Hartley employed flags in several of his canvases, while in oils like his Portrait of a German Officer he did so to denote a military personage, as his title informs us. Cultural signification is especially apparent in early works by the American painter Stuart Davis, who around 1924 created pictures depicting or incorporating Lucky Strike cigarette packs and the Evening Journal sports or the Odol bathroom disinfectant. As with Picasso’s earlier incorporations of cigarette packs and wine-bottle labels, Davis’s imagery hints at a throwaway culture. In the early-1950s the painter would return to mass-communications imagery, fusing abstractive and highly colourful patterning that derived stylistically from late Matisse, with slogans and phrases taken from advertising, supermarket signs and retail exhortations to consume (see opposite). Such images certainly put Davis in the forefront of the growing wave of artists who would prove responsive to mass-culture.

Another painter who had grown increasingly aware of mass-culture was the Surrealist painter, Salvador Dalí. The invasion of France in 1940 had forced him to flee to the United States, and the eight years he lived there affected him deeply, for he was thoroughly exposed to American mass-culture. Not least of all he came into contact with the Hollywood movie industry, designing a film sequence for Alfred Hitchcock and developing a cartoon for Walt Disney (although that short would not be completed and shown until 2003, more than thirteen years after the painter’s death). Dalí especially wanted to create cartoons because he felt they articulated the psychology of the masses. Dalí’s American years undoubtedly made him more populist, more aware of the ability of the media to communicate on a vast scale, and more conscious of the power of money. He returned there most years after 1948, in the mid-1960s not only becoming friendly with Andy Warhol but even undertaking a screen test for him. Slightly later he created a very witty image that stands at the frontier between Surrealism and Pop/Mass-Culture Art. This is a fusion of two faces, one of which had already figured importantly in Warhol’s work, while the other was just about to do so.

Early Pop/Mass-Culture Art in Britain

During the late-1940s a further artist deeply influenced by Surrealism strongly anticipated Pop/Mass-Culture Art. This was the British sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, who would subsequently become a key member of the Independent Group. In 1949 Paolozzi embarked upon a set of highly inventive and witty collages bringing together popular magazine covers, adverts, ‘cheesecake’ photos and the like. Everywhere the banality of the imagery interested him, although in 1971 he was careful to point out that “It’s easier for me to identify with [the tradition of Surrealism] than to allow myself to be described by some term, invented by others, called ‘Pop’, which immediately means that you dive into a barrel of Coca-Cola bottles. What I like to think I’m doing is an extension of radical surrealism.” Surrealism was an exploration of the subconscious and clearly, by the late-1940s that part of Paolozzi’s mind readily absorbed the imagery of popular culture. Subsequently, in the mid-1950s, he would make inventive collages incorporating diagrammatic machine images that would again clearly point to things-to-come.

Paolozzi was not the only artist working in Britain who intuited the future. In 1956 the painter Richard Hamilton created a poster-design collage bearing the ironic title Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?, which brings together many of the images and objects soon to be explored by others. They include household artefacts in abundance, such as a television set supposedly projecting the image of a stereotypically ‘perfect’ face; banal ‘cheesecake’ and ‘beefsteak’ nudes or semi-nudes; a trite Young Romance comic-strip image, apparently enlarged in relationship to its surroundings and framed to hang on the wall; a traditional portrait accompanying it on the wall; a corporate logo adorning a lampshade; and an image of a superstar, in this case Al Jolson seen in the distance. A paddle carried by the Charles Atlas figure bears the word ‘POP’.

Stuart Davis,Premiere, 1957. Oil on canvas, 147 x 127 cm. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California.

Stuart Davis,Lucky Strike, 1924. Oil on paperboard, 45.7 x 60.9 cm. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

Salvador Dalí,Mao/Marilyn, cover design, December 1971-January 1972 issue of French edition of Vogue magazine, Condé Nast publication, Paris. Photo: Philippe Halsman.

Usefully, in the year after Hamilton created Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? he listed the qualities a new ‘Pop Art’ would need to possess for it to appeal to a mass-audience; it must be:

Popular (designed for a mass audience)

Transient (short-term solution)

Expendable (easily forgotten)

Low cost

Mass produced

Young (aimed at youth)

Witty

Sexy

Gimmicky

Glamorous

Big Business

It might be thought that this constitutes a good, working definition of ‘Pop Art’ but a number of factors demonstrate the need for caution. Firstly, the list was written in a private letter that was not made public until well after the large-scale advent of Pop/Mass-Culture Art, and so it could never act as some kind of manifesto. Secondly, Hamilton was outlining the needs of the mass-audience for so-called ‘Pop Art’ and only therefore implying the needs of its creators, which would not necessarily be the same thing at all. Thirdly, and most importantly, the subject-matter that would be dealt with by artists contributing to the Pop/Mass-Culture Art tradition would quickly range far beyond the parameters Hamilton listed. To take but one example, Andy Warhol would certainly create an art that was popular, mass-produced, aimed at youth, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous and Big Business, but he would also deal with hero-worship, religious hogwash, the banality inherent to modern materialism, world-weariness, nihilism and death, all matters that certainly did not figure in Hamilton’s shopping list. So does that mean that Warhol should not be linked to Pop/Mass-Culture Art, or does it suggest that Hamilton’s notion of what would constitute ‘Pop Art’ is unnecessarily limiting and inexact? Surely it is the latter. Moreover, much of the art to come would prove to be anything but transient, easily forgotten, cheaply priced or mass-produced.

Marsden Hartley,Portrait of a German Officer, 1914. Oil on canvas, 173.3 x 105 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Eduardo Paolozzi,Automobile Head, 1954-62. Screenprint on paper, 61.6 x 41.3 cm. Tate, London.

Richard Hamilton,Hers Is a Lush Situation, 1958. Oil, cellulose, metal sheet, collage on panel, 84 x 122 cm. Colin St John Wilson, London.

Hamilton followed up his 1956 collage by producing paintings such as Hommage à Chrysler Corpof 1957, in which he abstracted car body parts; Hers is a Lush Situation of 1958 (see above), in which sections of a 1957 Cadillac are linked to a photo of the glass facade of a building; and $he of 1959-60, in which he brought together areas of a female body, a refrigerator, a toilet seat and a toaster. However, Hamilton would never be a painter interested in churning out long series of works exploring any particular area of mass-culture, and consequently he has never enjoyed the impact of artists such as Lichtenstein and Warhol who would later do so. Instead, he preferred to act more as an aesthetic explorer in the mould of Marcel Duchamp, whom he reveres, and whose damaged Large Glass he replicated in the early 1960s. For this reason the degree to which Hamilton was an aesthetic pioneer is certainly underestimated, especially in America.

A further British painter was also tapping into the mainstream of popular mass-culture from the mid-1950s onwards, albeit in a highly nostalgic way. This was Peter Blake (Children reading Comics, 1954; Couples, 1959; Got a Girl, 1960-61; Cover for theBeatles’album,Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1967; On the Balcony, 1955-57; Tattooed Lady, 1958; Self-Portrait with Badges, 1961; Love Wall, 1961; The Meeting or Have a Nice Day Mr Hockney, 1981-83). He would later state, “I started to become a pop artist from my interest in English folk art… Especially my interest in the visual art of the fairground, and barge painting too… Now I want to recapture and bring to life again something of this old-time popular art.” Additional stimulus was derived from an early art teacher who had been particularly interested not only in barge painting but also in tattoos, patchwork quilts, and painted and hand-written signs. Usually none of these types of images and patterns had been regarded as art, simply because most such work is naive and untutored (which is, of course, the source of its visual strength and communicative directness). Early in life Blake equally developed an unusually intense interest in collecting postcards, curios, knick-knacks, old tickets, fly posters, metalled advertisements, ‘primitive’ paintings, examples of child art and comic strips, all of which fed into the imagery of his work. The latter attractions are especially clear in Children reading Comics of 1954 (see above). Under such an influence, and armed with an awareness of the works of American painters and illustrators Ben Shahn, Saul Steinberg, Bernard Perlin and Honoré Sharrer (whose pictures he saw in London at a Tate Gallery show held in 1956), Blake also went on to create representations of circus folk, wrestlers and the like. This phase of his output came to a climax with On the Balcony of 1955-7 in which two simulated photos of members of the Royal Family on the balcony of Buckingham Palace are surrounded by five children, other images of people on balconies (including one by Manet), and a mass of small pictures taken from art and life, including the latter as represented by the mass-media Life magazine. By 1959, when Blake created Couples (see opposite), his interest in popular printed ephemera could form the stuff of art, by drawing our attention to cultural ubiquity and the narrow borderline between sentiment and sentimentality.

By the late-1950s Paolozzi, Hamilton and Blake were still unknown in the United States, and thus they could not contribute to the rise of Pop/Mass-Culture Art there. So what did propel the emergence of that creative dynamic on the western side of the Atlantic Ocean?

Sir Peter Blake,Children reading Comics, 1954. Oil on hardboard, 36.9 x 47 cm. Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery, Carlisle, Cumbria, UK.

Sir Peter Blake,Couples, 1959. Collage on notice board, 89 x 59.7 cm. Collection of the artist.

The Rise of Pop/Mass-Culture Art in America

Primarily an important artistic movement contributed towards the advent of Pop/Mass-Culture Art in America, albeit in an entirely antithetical way. This was the prevailing avant-garde tendency of the day, Abstract Expressionism (which was also termed ‘Action Painting’ and ‘New York School painting’). Such a movement had emerged in the mid-1940s and it flourished during the 1950s, in the process shifting the centre of art-world power from Paris to New York. American artists and émigrés to New York, who included Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Hans Hofmann, Adolph Gottlieb, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Helen Frankenthaler, all forged a completely innovative aesthetic by exploring new expressive, painterly, formal, colouristic and psychological dimensions to painting and drawing. For the most part theirs was an art committed to non-representation, although the imagery and scale of their works often addressed reality metaphorically (as with, say, the paintings of Motherwell dealing obliquely with the Spanish Civil War, and the canvases of Pollock which were openly intended to articulate his responses to the age of the radio, the automobile and the atomic bomb). Several members of the New York School, most notably Pollock, came close to fulfilling an automatism which was implicit in Surrealism but which had not been thoroughly explored by members of that earlier group, while most of the Abstract Expressionists carried through the gestural implications of earlier phases of Expressionism. But what connected all of these painters was a shared determination to create an art that would reach down through the subconscious to touch core values of spirituality, emotion, seriousness, intellectual complexity and authentic experience.

It is perhaps to be expected that such noble aspirations would engender a reaction, and certainly they did so amongst the next generation of artists who felt that the territory explored by the Abstract Expressionists had been thoroughly exhausted, leaving them nowhere to go. Undoubtedly these younger figures were creatively committed, but as they looked at the world of the late-1950s they gradually turned their backs on the goals so prized by their immediate forebears. After all, where were such lofty qualities to be readily found in an increasingly cynical, emotionally fearful, youth-orientated, irreligious and hedonistic society filled with the bogus posturing of advertising men and the materialistic emptiness of mass-consumption? If an artist holds a mirror to society, then surely he or she should be reflecting the emergence of Bill Haley and Elvis Presley around 1955, the advent of Disneyland and McDonalds that selfsame year, the automotive and aeronautical revolutions that really took off in the 1950s, the emergence of a new generation of teenagers around 1960 (the so-called ‘baby-boomers’ sired by military personnel returning from service in World War II some fifteen years earlier), the very moment when television began to outstrip cinema as the principal means of global visual communication, and the sexual revolution that began when the oral contraceptive pill became available in 1960-1. Accordingly, they ditched the values of Abstract Expressionism and instead adopted a ‘cool’ or emotionally distanced response to the world, an orientation towards youth and hedonism, and a witty irreverence about everything ranging from religion to art, if not even a cynicism regarding the world they had inherited. Such an attitude allowed them to comment ironically upon the false promises of admen and the vacuity of mass-consumption, as typified by its fetishes or objects of worship such as the Coca-Cola bottle, the hamburger, the comic-strip, the pop idol and the Hollywood superstar.

The rejection of the values of Abstract Expressionism can already be witnessed prior to the mid-1950s, for example, in Robert Rauschenberg’s total erasure of a drawing by Willem de Kooning in 1953. (This highly symbolic neo-Dadaist or anti-art gesture comprises a virtually blank sheet of paper that now sits in a frame and resides in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Originally, it may have equally demonstrated Rauschenberg’s complete disdain for the financial value invested in such an object but today, of course, it is worth a fortune.) In that same year Rauschenberg also made all-white paintings in which the shadows cast by the spectator generate the only visual dynamic in the works. Such a transfer took to its logical conclusion the notion of Duchamp and others that it is the viewer who completes the communicative circuit of any given work of art, and thereby creates its ultimate significance. This is certainly undeniable, if hardly profound.

Claes Oldenburg,The Store, 1962. Photo of installation. Green Gallery, New York.

No less importantly, in 1953 Larry Rivers broke with Abstract Expressionism by reworking the imagery of a hallowed representation of American history, Emanuel Leutze’s painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware river, which we have already seen indirectly because it appears in the background of Grant Wood’sDaughters of Revolution. Rivers gave the subject the full Abstract Expressionist treatment of heavily gestural brush marks, and by such messy means he attained his stated intention of communicating the true discomfort that George Washington and his fellow-revolutionaries must have felt when making a winter river-crossing, feelings that are not imparted by the absurdly heroic posturing of Leutze’s figures. As well as attacking the orthodoxy of Abstract Expressionism by placing its painterly approach at the service of history painting, Rivers also used the re-working of the Leutze as a means of undermining the values of conservative America, which was then going through a period of extreme Cold War paranoia.

In 1954 a friend and neighbour of Rauschenberg’s in Manhattan, Jasper Johns, created a parallel to the Rivers image, and did so in iconic terms not unlike those of the latter, by beginning a series of paintings and drawings of the American flag (see above). Over the next four or so years he would give this most familiar and integral of all emblems of American culture an apparently gestural painterly treatment similar to that of Abstract Expressionism (although to perceive a subtle contradiction in his technical approach, see the commentary below the reproduction). In the process, he fused imagery that enjoys profound symbolic value with a conscious denotation of the act of painting, just as Rivers had done in 1953. However, the apparent energisation of the surfaces of the paintings and drawings does not break down the flag in any way, as Rivers had done with his representation of George Washington and others. This is because Johns was equally concerned to emphasise the purely formal and colouristic qualities of the symbol. In most of the works he furthered this aim by isolating the banner within the overall design, while in a number of the pictures (such as representations of the flag in white) he also made the emblem hard to see. In other Flag paintings he varied the colours of the sign, thereby subverting our notions of the real. Some of the images (such as the very first of the Flag paintings) are built up over layers of newsprint, and where these levels remain evident they necessarily introduce mass-media associations. As always, Johns emphasised the flatness of the flag by avoiding any notions of spatial recession – constantly it remains a frontal arrangement of shapes on a flat background. The end result of all these factors is to make the flags appear physically disembodied and drained of iconic, nationalistic purpose. Such disassociation would have an enormous impact upon Andy Warhol in particular when he saw the Flags pictures in Johns’s debut solo exhibition held at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in January 1958, as he would subtly make clear in paintings he would produce in the 1960s.

Just a couple of months after Leo Castelli had exhibited Johns’s Flag paintings early in 1958, the dealer displayed Robert Rauschenberg’s first Combine paintings, so-named because of their amalgamation of flat, painted surfaces with three-dimensional objects. The gesturality of Abstract Expressionist brushwork is still very much in evidence in these works and, indeed, it would never really disappear from Rauschenberg’s output thereafter, being a useful way of both imparting enormous energy to the images and necessarily making analogous points about the dynamism of the contemporary world. Additionally, Rauschenberg occasionally pasted newspaper photographs and comic-strip material into the Combines, thereby creating mass-media associations, while in some of the works he introduced a particular icon of popular culture, the Coke bottle, and did so in rows that ineluctably induce thoughts of both mass-production and mass-consumption. In yet other Combines Rauschenberg incorporated actual Coca-Cola signs, thus touching upon signification directly.

The 1958-61 period also saw the debut exhibitions in New York and Los Angeles of further artists who would soon be prominent in the Pop/Mass-Culture Art dynamic. They included Marisol, Allan D’Arcangelo, Ed Kienholz, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, Richard Smith and Tom Wesselmann, all of whom are discussed below. On the other side of the Atlantic, a number of emergent Pop/Mass-Culture Art painters came together in 1959 as post-graduate students at the Royal College of Art in London. They included David Hockney, Allen Jones and Peter Phillips who each receive further mention in this book.

The Triumph of Pop/Mass-Culture Art

The international emergence of Pop/Mass-Culture Art finally took place in 1961-2. In London the 1961 ‘Young Contemporaries’ exhibition served notice to the world that Hockney, Jones, Phillips, Patrick Caulfield and others were bringing a new ‘Pop’ sensibility into being. The following year saw shows in New York, Los Angeles and London of works by Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, James Rosenquist, Roy Lichtenstein, George Segal, Robert Indiana, Peter Blake, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann and Wayne Thiebaud who all made the public more aware of mass-production and/or mass-culture. By the time these exhibitions were mounted, Leo Castelli had been followed by a growing number of dealers, such as Ivan Karp, Richard Bellamy, Sidney Janis, Martha Jackson, Eleanor Ward, Allan Stone and Irving Blum, who proved equally receptive to Pop/Mass-Culture Art. Naturally, they quickly realised the economic potential such work enjoyed, especially to those many collectors, museum directors, members of their boards and ordinary art-lovers who had never engaged with abstract art.

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