American Pop Art In France

Pop art was essential to the Americanization of global art in the 1960s, yet it engendered resistance and adaptation abroad in equal measure, especially in Paris. From the end of the Algerian War of Independence and the opening of Ileana Sonnabend’s gallery for American Pop art in Paris in 1962, to the silkscreen poster workshops of May ’68, this book examines critical adaptations of Pop motifs and pictorial devices across French painting, graphic design, cinema and protest aesthetics. Liam Considine argues that the transatlantic dispersion of Pop art gave rise to a new politics of the image that challenged Americanization and prefigured the critiques and contradictions of May ’68.

"Catalog of the exhibition:" p. viii-xii. Bibliography: p. 133-140. Based on an exhibition organized for and shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, April 16. 1974, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts.

A global survey of Pop art that reassesses its roots, impact, and legacy This groundbreaking book surveys the concurrent engagements with the spirit of Pop throughout the world, from the frequently studied activity in the United States, England, and France to less well-known developments in Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. One of the first publications to examine Pop art with this global scope, The World Goes Pop explores the wide-ranging movements that developed on different continents, such as Nouveau Réalisme, Neo Dada, New Figuration, and Spiritual Pop. This unique presentation offers the opportunity to compare how Pop art around the world differed due to geography, local traditions, and different cultures' social and political underpinnings. Fascinating essays touch upon key themes that factored into various Pop movements, including feminism, political representation, sexual politics, and seriality. A bold design and 200 striking illustrations showcase pieces by more than 60 artists, many of whose works have never been exhibited outside their home nations. The book also features a combined interview with a number of the living artists featured within, giving important insight into the thoughts and processes of Pop's international practitioners.

Experience the creative explosion that transformed American art—in the words of the artists, writers, and critics who were there In the quarter century after the end of World War II, a new generation of painters, sculptors, and photographers transformed the face of American art and shifted the center of the art world from Paris to New York. Signaled by the triumph of abstraction and the ascendancy of painters such as Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning, and Kline, this revolution generated an exuberant and contentious body of writing without parallel in our cultural history. In the words of editor, art critic, and historian Jed Perl, “there has never been a period when the visual arts have been written about with more mongrel energy—with more unexpected mixtures of reportage, rhapsody, analysis, advocacy, editorializing, and philosophy.” In this Library of America volume, Perl gathers for the first time the most vibrant contemporary accounts of this momentous period—by artists, critics, poets, gallery owners, and other observers—conveying the sweep and energy of a cultural scene dominated (in the poet James Schuyler’s words) by “the floods of paint in whose crashing surf we all scramble.” Here are statements by the most significant artists, and major critical essays by Clement Greenberg, Susan Sontag, Hilton Kramer, and other influential figures. Here too is an electrifying array of responses by poets and novelists, reflecting the free interplay between different art forms: John Ashbery on Andy Warhol; James Agee on Helen Levitt; James Baldwin on Beauford Delaney; Truman Capote on Richard Avedon; Tennessee Williams on Hans Hofmann; and Jack Kerouac on Robert Frank. The atmosphere of the time comes to vivid life in memoirs, diaries, and journalism by Peggy Guggenheim, Dwight Macdonald, Calvin Tomkins, and others. Lavishly illustrated with scores of black-and-white images and a 32-page color insert, this is a book that every art lover will treasure.

Essay by Wendy Weitman.

An original and insightful new history of Pop Art from one of the most important art historians of our time Thomas Crow's paradigm-changing book challenges existing narratives about the rise of Pop Art by situating it within larger cultural tides. While American Pop was indebted to its British predecessor's insistence that any creative pursuit is worthy of aesthetic consideration, Crow demonstrates that this inclusive attitude also had strong American roots. Folk becomes Crow's starting point in the advance of Pop. The folk revival occurred chiefly in the sphere of music during the 1930s and '40s, while folk art surfaced a decade later in the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Crow eloquently examines the subsequent explosion of commercial imagery in visual art, alongside its repercussions in popular music and graphic design. Pop's practitioners become defined as artists whose distillation of the vernacular is able to capture the feelings stirring among a broad public, beginning with young participants in the politicized 1960s counterculture. Woody Guthrie and Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan, Ed Ruscha and the Byrds, Pauline Boty and the Beatles, the Who and Damien Hirst are all considered together with key graphic designers such as Milton Glaser and Rick Griffin in this engaging book.

"Published on the occasion of the exhibition International Pop, organized by Darsie Alexander with Bartholomew Ryan for the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis."

Taking on the myth of France's creative exhaustion following World War II, this collection of essays brings together an international team of scholars, whose research offers English readers a rich and complex overview of the place of France and French artists in the visual arts since 1945. Addressing a wide range of artistic practices, spanning over seven decades, and using different methodologies, their contributions cover ground charted and unknown. They introduce greater depth and specificity to familiar artists and movements, such as Lettrism, Situationist International or Nouveau Réalisme, while bringing to the fore lesser known artists and groups, including GRAPUS, the Sociological Art Collective, and Nicolas Schöffer. Collectively, they stress the political dimensions and social ambitions of the art produced in France at the time, deconstruct the traditional geography of the French art world, and highlight the multiculturalism of the French art scene that resulted from its colonial past and the constant flux of artistic travels and migrations. Ultimately, the book contributes to a story of postwar art in which France can be inscribed not as a main or sub chapter, but rather as a vector in the wider constellation of modern and contemporary art.