Pop Art: An International Perspective

"The emergence of Pop Art in the 1950s laid down a challenge to the earnest evangelists of modern art. Pop was a new democratic art accessible to all in its use of mass-media imagery: newspapers, photographs, billboard advertisements, comic strips and cinema heroes. The works had a new vitality that celebrated the dramas of possession and consumption with willful crudeness and brutality. The protagonists of Pop spoke a universal language, recycling everyday motifs and artifacts as an integral part of their imagery. Developments in both the United States and Britain in the work of such artists as Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Eduardo Paolozzi, Richard Hamilton, Peter Blake and David Hockney, were mirrored in Europe, where an art that was permissive, urban, and contemporary, was pursued with no less urgency Nine authoritative essays, by leading art historians, explore the issues raised by Pop, and discuss and analyse the background to its culture and its exponents. The views of the artists and critics are presented in an extensive anthology, offering an insight into the phenomenon at first hand, while the inclusion of biographies of sixty-two artists and an arresting gallery of 194 colour plates, make Pop Art an important reference work. This book celebrates an art that after three decades still retains its youthful exuberance, humour, glamour and popular appeal and continues to inspire a new generation of artists with its imagery and techniques." --