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The First Pop Age: Painting and Subjectivity in the Art of Hamilton, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Richter, and Ruscha
A compelling take on Pop art from esteemed critic Hal Foster
Who branded painting in the Pop age more brazenly than Richard Hamilton, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and Ed Ruscha? And who probed the Pop revolution in image and identity more intensely than they? In The First Pop Age , leading critic and historian Hal Foster presents an exciting new interpretation of Pop art through the work of these Pop Five.
Beautifully illustrated in color throughout, the book reveals how these seminal artists hold on to old forms of art while drawing on new subjects of media; how they strike an ambiguous attitude toward both high art and mass culture; and how they suggest that a heightened confusion between images and people is definitive of Pop culture at large.
As The First Pop Age looks back to the early years of Pop art, it also raises important questions about the What has changed in the look of screened and scanned images today? Is our media environment qualitatively different from that described by Warhol and company? Have we moved beyond the Pop age, or do we live in its aftermath?
A masterful account of one of the most important periods of twentieth-century art, this is a book that also sheds new light on our complex relationship to images today.
Who branded painting in the Pop age more brazenly than Richard Hamilton, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and Ed Ruscha? And who probed the Pop revolution in image and identity more intensely than they? In The First Pop Age , leading critic and historian Hal Foster presents an exciting new interpretation of Pop art through the work of these Pop Five.
Beautifully illustrated in color throughout, the book reveals how these seminal artists hold on to old forms of art while drawing on new subjects of media; how they strike an ambiguous attitude toward both high art and mass culture; and how they suggest that a heightened confusion between images and people is definitive of Pop culture at large.
As The First Pop Age looks back to the early years of Pop art, it also raises important questions about the What has changed in the look of screened and scanned images today? Is our media environment qualitatively different from that described by Warhol and company? Have we moved beyond the Pop age, or do we live in its aftermath?
A masterful account of one of the most important periods of twentieth-century art, this is a book that also sheds new light on our complex relationship to images today.
- GenresArtArt HistoryNonfiction
352 pages, Hardcover
First published October 24, 2011
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About the author
Hal Foster
309 books142 followersHal Foster is a Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University specializing in 20th century art.
Note: for the comic book artist, see Harold "Hal" Foster.
Note: for the comic book artist, see Harold "Hal" Foster.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 25, 2016
This is the kind of book I treasure most: one that got me to change my opinion on a topic I thought I understood well. Because of the successors to Warhol it is easy to fall into the knee-jerk reaction that Pop Art is the laziest form around. I never really paid attention to Richard Hamilton's work. Shame on me for that. In his Hommage a Chrysler Corp (1957), for example, you can still find depth-perception in the frame such as it exists in classical painting and poetry ("If the artist is not to lose much of his ancient purpose," wrote Hamilton, "he may have to plunder the popular arts to recover the imagery which is his rightful inheritance".)
Why paint all of Sophia Loren when you can simply paint that part of her which affects you most, namely her lips? On first blush such borrowing seems facile, but it is not so different from Mallarmé's use of a Japanese fan in lieu of Japanese culture, a stained glass window in lieu of European civilization. Foster shows how the nonjudgmental approach to mass media culture is the more endurable stance over those like Clement Greenberg and F.R. Leavis who were more into contempt. He traces this modernist approach back to Baudelaire, and thrillingly, you can see how Manet and the artists of Pop are onto the same poetry.
Such a nonjudgmental approach could still be critical in the early 1960s, as Warhol, with his nasally non-sayings sounded practically gnomic; nowadays, mass media culture is too rooted in our lives to pretend it does not exist. It looks a bit stupid to affect a mixture of high and low cultures when it is already mixed. Lichtenstein was loud but he certainly was not celebratory about the things he borrowed from. As Foster says, one can see the desperation in the very deadpan of pop, in the extremity of its willed impersonality. This had been exciting in the First Pop Age; now in the internet age saying nothing looks like evasion.
Why paint all of Sophia Loren when you can simply paint that part of her which affects you most, namely her lips? On first blush such borrowing seems facile, but it is not so different from Mallarmé's use of a Japanese fan in lieu of Japanese culture, a stained glass window in lieu of European civilization. Foster shows how the nonjudgmental approach to mass media culture is the more endurable stance over those like Clement Greenberg and F.R. Leavis who were more into contempt. He traces this modernist approach back to Baudelaire, and thrillingly, you can see how Manet and the artists of Pop are onto the same poetry.
Such a nonjudgmental approach could still be critical in the early 1960s, as Warhol, with his nasally non-sayings sounded practically gnomic; nowadays, mass media culture is too rooted in our lives to pretend it does not exist. It looks a bit stupid to affect a mixture of high and low cultures when it is already mixed. Lichtenstein was loud but he certainly was not celebratory about the things he borrowed from. As Foster says, one can see the desperation in the very deadpan of pop, in the extremity of its willed impersonality. This had been exciting in the First Pop Age; now in the internet age saying nothing looks like evasion.
June 23, 2015
I was just in the middle of writing a long, considered review of this book when I suddenly lost it all and now I have to run. I might try and do it later.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews