Another British invasion: Allentown Art Museum exhibits Pop prints from across the pond

Allentown Art Museum exhibits Pop prints from across the pond to celebrate 50 years of the Beatles arrival in America

April 05, 2014|By Tim Higgins, Special to The Morning Call

Although Pop Art is commonly associated with Americans such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, it actually was a British invention, dating to at least five years earlier than American Pop.

Britian experienced a late-1950s culture boom and continued swinging well into the '60s. British culture — film, fashion, music and art — was being gobbled up by American audiences at an amazing pace.

The famed exhibition "This is Tomorrow" at the Whitehall Chapel in London in 1956 introduced British Pop Art to the world, seven years before a similar exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that introduced American Pop.

Artists with names like David Hockney, Peter Phillips, Patrick Caulfield, Nicholas Monro, Ronald Kitaj and Peter Blake gained recognition across the pond.

They're among the artists whose works are on the walls of the Allentown Art Museum in its new exhibition, "British Pop Prints."

"These were artists who were trying to invent something new," says Diane Fischer, museum curator. "This was meant to be an affront to the polite British art world."

The show of about 23 works from the museum's extensive holdings was created as an homage to this year's 50th anniversary of the British Invasion— think Beatles, Rolling Stones and others.

On view are mostly silkscreens, the medium of choice for Pop artists, that are classic, rare examples of early Pop Art.

"There are about 200 British Pop prints in the collection," Fischer says, "that were acquired in 1980, and given to the museum by the Martin Ackerman Foundation." Ackerman, an American tax lawyer, businessman, author and the publisher of Arts Review magazine, died in 1993. Before his death he established a foundation to give much of his art collection to museums throughout the world.

"This is really a beautiful collection," Fischer says. "These works have not been exhibited in 10 years and some have not been exhibited ever at the Allentown Art Museum."

While Hockney is one of the most recognized artists in the world, others are better known by their work than their name. Blake was the designer of the cover art for the Beatles' album "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band."

The exhibit includes works by Eduardo Paolozzi, an artist born in Scotland to Italian immigrant parents who is today considered the father of Pop Art. His 1967 silkscreen, "The Silken World of Michelangelo," for example, is an odd collage that pictures a colorful Mickey Mouse next to a classical image of the head of The David.

From its inception, Pop Art was about mass culture, and to understand why that matters, one has to understand the post-World War II art world and where these artists and these prints figure into it.

Europe was in shambles after the war, and the center of the art world had shifted from London, Paris, Vienna, Munich and Rome to the American cities of New York and Chicago. In the 1950s, America was the world's poster child for expendable wealth and mass consumerism.

Among the 1940s and '50s avant-garde, Abstraction was winning the argument against Realism and the current hero was Abstract Expressionism, exemplified by the action painting of Jackson Pollack, which was praised by the leading critics of the times.

Pop Art was born when in 1952, a band of British artists formed the Independent Group. It was a reaction to Abstract Expressionism, and these young painters, sculptors, architects, writers and critics rebelled by blurring the lines between high and low art. What they saw in the overwhelming array of media and mass culture was a new means of expression and comment.

At the first Independent Group meeting in 1952, Paolozzi presented a series of collages assembled from imagery found in advertising, comic book characters, magazine covers and mass-produced graphics that mostly represented American popular culture.

Among these was Paolozzi's 1947 collage, "I Was a Rich Man's Plaything," which includes the word "pop" appearing in a cloud of smoke from a revolver.

"British Pop is distinctive in its examination of the banal and kitschy aspects of American mass media from afar, whereas the American Pop art movement, which culminated in the early 1960s, is viewed as more of an ironic celebration from within," says Fischer.

These Pop artists, says Fischer, "Believed that the art produced by Hollywood, Detroit and Madison Avenue was as serious as what was being shown in galleries and museums, thus challenging the traditions of the fine art establishment. In their work they incorporated images created by American pop culture and advertising through collage and mechanical means of reproduction."

Paolozzi's 1967 silkscreen print, "Donald Duck meets Mondrian," is rendered almost exactly like his earlier work from the 1940s and '50s, incorporating a cut-and-paste technique. He scavenges source material from magazines and advertisements, this time with the addition of Mondrian images from commercial art publications.

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