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In the late 1950s and early 60s a new movement seized the imagery of mass produced popular culture and turned it into art ... Pop Art wasn’t an all-boys’ club: from the beginning female artists pioneered a vision of consumer culture that was as brilliant and surprising as that of their male counterparts. Alastair Sooke, Pop Go the Women: The Other Story of Pop Art, BBC 2014
The most intriguing one of them all ... Pauline Boty embodied the spirit of pop. ibid.
[Jann] Haworth’s big break came in 1963 when her work was showcased at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. ibid.
With her stitched grannies and cloth objects, Haworth had discovered a new direction for sculpture. ibid.
[Roy] Lichtenstein did encourage [Letty Lou] Eisenhauer’s pop paintings. Today, they’ve all been lost. ibid.
Pace Gallery Jan 7 – Jan 25: International Girlie Exhibit: almost half of the works were by women. One of them was Rosalyn Drexler. ibid.
Marisol – then her art filled an entire room [New York] ... Marisol was the only female artist who commanded the same sort of prices as the men. ibid.
We were seeing the future and we knew it for sure ... [Andy] Warhol and his fellow pop artists created some of the most memorable images of the twentieth century. Alastair Sooke, Soup Cans and Superstars, BBC 2015
Pop seemed tacky and lightweight, a vacuous fad ... Pop offered modern art to the masses. ibid.
Johnson ... created some of America's earliest pop art. ibid.
Oldenburg ... quickly became an influential figure in the downtown avant-garde performance art movement known as the Happenings. ibid.
In fact Pop Art was invented not in America at the start of the sixties but ten years earlier in Britain. (Art & Artists: Pop Art) ibid.
Richard Hamilton: for years his brainy take on Pop Art was neglected. ibid.
The art of Peter Blake is a riot of working-class entertainment. The pleasures of rock music, the fairground, the circus. ibid.
[Allen] Jones ... gave Kubrick his blessing to copy his work in A Clockwork Orange. ibid.
There were female Pop Artists who attacked the chauvinism of popular culture and were than side-lined for years. ibid.
Nichola L made this furniture when she arrived in New York in 1967. ibid.
Paris: new [poster] designs appeared in their hundreds. The posters were the work of ... the People’s Studio ... 1968 Pop Art finally connected with the workers on the street. ibid.
Behind the Iron Curtain where from the beginning of the seventies Pop became a means of political subversion. ibid.
I’ll give you an interesting analogy here. Have you ever read Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter? All right. Now in that book you’ll remember that this deaf mute, Mr Singer, this person who doesn't communicate at all, is finally revealed in a subtle way to be a completely empty, heartless person. And yet because he’s a deaf mute, he symbolises things to desperate people. They come to him and tell him all their troubles. They cling to him as a source of strength, as a kind of semi-religious figure in their lives. Andy is kind of like Mr Singer. Desperate, lost people find their way to him, looking for some sort of salvation, and Andy sort of sits back like a deaf mute with very little to offer. Truman Capote
In 1954 small-town southern boy Jasper Johns settled in New York City and began to paint the ultimate symbol of Americanness – the Stars and Stripes. Andrew Graham-Dixon, Art of America: What Lies Beneath 3/3, BBC 2011
By the early sixties a new generation of artists was confronting the strangeness of consumer society. ibid.
Those who followed called themselves pop artists. ibid.
Claes Oldenburg made supersized floppily repulsive hamburgers out of stuffed cloth. ibid.
James Rosenquist created vast canvases of collage images. ibid.
The one pop artist whose work seemed to embrace consumerism was Andy Warhol ... An art of numb repetition. ibid.
It’s variety but it’s also a trap ... This is your world, America. ibid.
Lichtenstein challenged people’s conceptions of art. And in doings became one of the defining image makers of the 1960s. Roy Lichtenstein: Pop Idol
Vandalising galleries with what appeared to be anti-art. ibid.
He began dabbling in abstract expressionism. ibid.
Lichtenstein instinctively felt that art must come out of its ivory tower. ibid.
Roy in the guise of Donald Duck was telling the world he was on to something big. ibid.
In the Spring of 1962 Lichtenstein had his legendary debut at the Costelli Gallery. ibid.
His public sculpture and murals can be found all over the United States. ibid.
Roy Litchenstein: American Pop artist; painter, lithographer and sculptor. Born in New York. Studied at the Art Students League 1939, and at Ohio State College 1940-3. War service 1943-6. Returned to Ohio State College 1946-9, and taught there until 1951. First one-man exhibition at the Carlebach Gallery, New York, 1951. Lived in Cleveland, Ohio 1951-7, painting and making a living at various odd jobs. Instructor at New York State University, Oswego, New York 1957-60, and at Rutgers University 1960-3. Painted in a non-figurative and Abstract Expressionist style 1957-61, but began latterly to incorporate loosely handled cartoon images, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck etc. in his paintings. Made a breakthrough into his characteristic work in 1961; painted pictures based on comic strip images, advertising imagery and overt adaptations of works of art by others, followed by classical ruins, paintings of canvas backs or stretchers, etc. Made land, sea, sky and moonscapes in 1964, sometimes in relief and incorporating plastics and enamelled metal. His later work includes some sculptures, mostly in polished brass, based on Art-Deco forms of the 1930s, etc. Lives in New York. Tate online
Jasper Johns: American painter and printmaker, forerunner of Pop art, who uses commonplace emblematic images such as flags or numbers as the starting-point for works of great richness and complexity. Born in Augusta, Georgia, and grew up in South Carolina. Studied at the University of South Carolina for about one and a half years when he received his first formal training in art, then moved in 1949 to New York. Two years military service, part of the time in Japan. From 1952 lived in New York, supporting himself until 1958 mainly by working in a bookstore. Friendship from the mid-1950s with Rauschenberg, the dancer Merce Cunningham and John Cage. Made his first ‘Flag’, ‘Target’ and ‘Number’ paintings in 1954 and 1955 his first one-man exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, in 1958 won him immediate recognition. Since 1960 has also made nearly 300 lithographs, etchings, screenprints, and embossed paper and lead reliefs. Director of the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts since 1963 and Artistic Adviser to Merce Cunningham and Dance Company. Lives in New York. Tate online
I’m not really sure what social message my art carries, if any. And I don’t really want it to carry one. I’m not interested in the subject matter to try to teach society anything, or to try to better our world in any way. Roy Lichtenstein
Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn’t look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself. Roy Lichtenstein
Yes, you know sometimes, we started out thinking out how strange our painting was next to normal painting, which was anything expressionist. You forget that this has been thirty five years now and people don’t look at it as if it were some kind of oddity. Roy Lichtenstein
David Hockney and Peter Blake, artists who came to represent British pop art. Janet Street-Porter, The Genius of British Art: Modern Times, Channel 4 2010
The father of British pop art: Richard Hamilton. Janet Street-Porter, The Genius of British Art: Modern Times
Richard Hamilton: One of the giants of twentieth century art. Great Artists in Their Own Words II: Out of the Darkness 1939-1966, Waldemar Januszczak, BBC 2013
Hamilton Pop Art: ‘I was trying to make an art that was figurative.’ ibid. interview with Joan Bakewell