20080517

Pop up portraits


© Marilyn Monroe (Marilyn) Andy Warhol, 1967


© Hunt for the Best Mel Ramos, 1965. Oil on canvas, 1213 x 781mm. The Richard Weisman Collection.


© In the Car Roy Lichtenstein, 1963. Oil and magna on canvas, 1720 x 2035mm. Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.
© Self-Portrait Andy Warhol, 1967. Silkscreen ink on synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 1867 x 1867 x 52mm. Tate, London, 2007.


Pop Art Portraits
Paul Moorhouse
With essay by Dominic Sandbrook

Pop Art defined the look of the 1960s and turned the tables on high art. By reacting against the post-war trend for abstract art, Pop Art asserted itself as a brash, bold figurative art.
With its groundbreaking use of familiar imagery from the world of advertising, magazines, pop music, cinema and comics, Pop Art blurred the boundaries between high and low culture. Although seen as subversive, Pop Art rapidly gained widespread appeal and its fascination with instantly recognisable celebrities placed portraiture at the centre of the Pop Art movement.

With the exhibition 'Pop Art Portrait' that took place at the National Portrait Gallery from October 07 till end of Jan 08, here is a book that complements the show, which both mission is to examine the role and significance of portraiture within Pop Art, one of the major art movements of the late twentieth century.

Pop Art Portrait, which can be ordered online, is published by curator Paul Moorhouse, and includes 65 pop illustrations. The book explores the vital role portraiture played in the parallel development of Pop in Britain and the USA.
Pop Art Portraits traces Pop Art's complex and creative engagement with portraiture from the early 1950s to its heyday and maturity in the 1960s.
This strikingly illustrated book shows how British and American Pop artists interconnected and differed.

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