THE POP ART TRADITION : RESPONDING TO MASS-CULTURE

By Eric Shanes

Published by Parkstone International, New York,

2006 First Edition

This book is a Large Pictorial HARDCOVER in fine condition with 255 pages with over 150 key art works in color & some black and white illustrations and photographs. Size of book is 12 3/4 inches by 10 3/4 inches. The Pictorial Dust Jacket is in very good condition.

Pop Art, an abbreviation of Popular Art, is a movement that found its origins in England in the 1950s but realised its full potential in New York in the 60s. The name referred to the interest of a number of artists, such as Robert Rauschenberg (born 1925) and Jasper Johns (born 1930), in the imagery and techniques of consumerism and popular culture.

Pop Art, led by the cult figure of Andy Warhol, was probably the most extraordinary innovation of 20th century art. It put art into everyday terms and so helped close the gap between ""high art"" and ""low art.""

The British artist Richard Hamilton defined Pop Art as: ""popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, glamorous, and Big Business.""

Richly documented and clearly structured, this book provides an overall view as well as a new and insightful perspective on Pop Art and the works of the artists who were at the forefront of this movement.

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

POP / MASS-CULTURE ART

THE PLATES

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

FROM THE COVER === Eric Shanes is primarily a painter who has exhibited many times in London and elsewhere. He is one of the world's leading authorities on Britain's greatest visual artist, J.M.W. Turner, and the author of ten bestselling books and catalogues on the life and work of that major European figure.

Additionally, Shanes has also written bestselling books and catalogues on Brancusi, Warhol, Hockney, The Golden Age of British Watercolours, and on the Impressionists in London. Parkstone International has published two books by Eric Shanes, one on J.M.W. Turner, the other on Andy Warhol.

Shanes is a Vice-President of the Turner Society and its current Chairman, as well as the Founding Editor of Turner Studies, a scholarly journal published by the Tate Gallery. He has also frequently contributed articles on Turner, Brancusi and other artists to specialist and popular journals and newspapers.

In 2000-2001 he curated the major exhibition entitled `Turner: The Great Watercolours' that was held at the Royal Academy of Arts in London to mark the 150th anniversary of Turner's death. Shanes lectures on traditional, modern and contemporary art all over the world.

Front cover illustration: Ed Paschke, Matinee, 1987. Oil on linen, 172.7 x 203.2 cm.

Robert H. Bergman collection, Chicago.

Back cover illustration: Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Spoonbridge and Cherry, 1987-1988.

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.

MORE ABOUT == Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid-1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art presented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular culture such as advertising and news. In pop art, material is sometimes visually removed from its known context, isolated, and/or combined with unrelated material. The concept of pop art refers not as much to the art itself as to the attitudes that led to it.

Pop art employs aspects of mass culture, such as advertising, comic books and mundane cultural objects. It is widely interpreted as a reaction to the then-dominant ideas of abstract expressionism, as well as an expansion upon them. And due to its utilization of found objects and images it is similar to Dada.

Pop art is aimed to employ images of popular as opposed to elitist culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any given culture, most often through the use of irony. It is also associated with the artists' use of mechanical means of reproduction or rendering techniques.

Pop art and minimalism are considered to be art movements that precede postmodern art, or are some of the earliest examples of Post-modern art themselves.

Pop art often takes as its imagery that which is currently in use in advertising. Product labeling and logos figure prominently in the imagery chosen by pop artists, as in the Campbell's Soup Cans labels, by Andy Warhol. Even the labeling on the shipping box containing retail items has been used as subject matter in pop art, for example in Warhol's Campbell's Tomato Juice Box 1964, or his Brillo Soap Box sculptures.