Pop Art in the U.S. and Europe

Valerio Adami, Joan Gardy Artigas, Richard Avedon, Enrico Baj, Elizabeth Blackadder, Richard Bosman, Christo, Robert Cottingham, Allan D'Arcangelo, Jim Dine, Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns, Alex Katz, R. B. Kitaj, Nicholas Krushenick, Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Lindner, Claes Oldenburg, Peter Phillips, Mel Ramos, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, James Rosenquist, George Segal, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Saul Steinberg, Andy Warhol, John Wesley, and Tom Wesselmann

Pop Art in the U.S. and Europe

Spaightwood Galleries invites you to browse our 2001 Pop Art show, featuring works by a number of POP Artists in America and Europe. As many of the Americans involved have said, they were simply tired of the heroic claims of Abstract Expressionism, of the "poetry" of paintings on the grand scale that painters like Pollock and Motherwell were creating. As Tom Wesselmann said, "I didn't want to deal in poetry. I got rid of that after a few months. I began to anyway. I guess it took me a couple of years to get rid of that. In fact, I guess it was a good two years before I began to come around to the idea that was also voiced and reinforcing myself by Alex Katz when I heard him say one time that his paintings looked brand new, like they'd just come out of a box. This was part of the climate at the time. It was all coming together in about 1962, I guess. More and more, I mean, because you had Lichtenstein coming on the scene, and Warhol and Rosenquist. Things were kind of clean and slick. It was just kind of in the air at the time." POP paintings looked to at least some of the people involved like something "brand new, like they'd just come out of a box" and many of the artists tried to make things that "were kind of clean and slick." On the other hand, one could argue that at the root of this aesthetic was the desire to do to American culture of the 1950s what Duchamp had done to French culture in the teens of the century when he shocked and outraged it by signing a store-bought urinal and displaying it in an exhibition as a work of art. For Johns and Rauschenberg, POP art was a return to DADA, to the anarchic impulse that proclaimed that art is whatever artists say it is and if they say a urinal, or a Brillo box, or a Campbell's Soup Can, or an F-111 is art, so be it. On the other hand (I think we're up to three hands here—perhaps space aliens have gotten involved), since one is hardly expected to study such objects seriously, perhaps we are not trying to outrage but to mock: POP as social satire. On the other hand still again, perhaps it is not necessary to divide things into either/or categories, perhaps American POP art was not so much a movement as a bunch of guys (relatively few women seem to have been involved, unlike Abstract Expressionism, which counted Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Lee Krasner, and Grace Hartigan among its prominent exponents) caught up in the heady excitement of messing about with new stuff. In Europe, however, despite the surface similarities, a different set of impulses can often be seen. For Valerio Adami, the appearance of newness seems more a part of an attempt to revitalize European culture by reminding it of its mythic roots; for Joan Gardy Artigas, it is clearly more a Duchampian strategy of presenting the unpresentable—sexuality—to the last moments (nearly 8 years of them) of Franco's Spain).