Featuring more than 100 works ranging from pioneering British Pop Art to the classic American version and its expansion into Europe, the exhibition aims to trace the shared sources of international Pop Art and to undertake a revision of the myths that have traditionally defined the movement.
curated by Paloma Alarcó
This summer, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza is presenting Pop Art Myths, the first exhibition on this
subject in Madrid since Pop Art at the Museo Reina Sofía in 1992. More than twenty years later, the
exhibition’s curator Paloma Alarcó, Head of Modern Painting at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, will
offer a reassessment of this artistic trend from a 21st-century viewpoint. Featuring more than 100
works ranging from pioneering British Pop Art to the classic American version and its expansion into
Europe, the exhibition aims to trace the shared sources of international Pop Art and to undertake a
revision of the myths that have traditionally defined the movement. It will reveal how the legendary
images created by artists of the stature of Warhol, Rauschenberg, Wesselmann, Lichtenstein,
Hockney, Hamilton and Equipo Crónica, among many others, conceal an ironic and innovative code of
perception of reality and one that still prevails in contemporary art today. The exhibition is sponsored
by Japan Tobacco International (JTI) and will include works from more than fifty museums and private
collections around the world, with important loans from the National Gallery of Washington, the
Tate, London, the IVAM, Valencia, and the prestigious Mugrabi Collection in New York, to name but a
few.
More than any other modern art movement, Pop immediately captured the popular imagination. Its
emergence in the late 1950s and early 1960s represented one of the most liberating moments in art
history. Furthermore, it was not only attractive to the general public, as the radical nature of its
challenge and its connections with underground culture also appealed to numerous intellectual
circles. In contrast to the widespread weariness at the time with the idealism of the modern
movement, characterised by its introspective, utopian nature, Pop Art offered the new generations
an exciting, secularised world in which there were no longer any boundaries between the artistic and
the everyday. For Pop, every image was recyclable, every object could be transformed into art and its
true aim, which time has demonstrated to have been achieved, was that of offering a new
interpretation of the image of contemporary culture.
In contrast to other thematic exhibitions on this movement
and the retrospectives on some of its leading artists that
have taken place over the past few years and which have
presented Pop as the forerunner of numerous artistic
trends, the approach offered by the exhibition’s curator is to
connect Pop with the past tradition of painting and to
highlight these links, revealing them through the Museum’s
own Permanent Collection, which concludes its survey of
more than 700 years of the history of painting with works by
some of the leading names of Pop.
The great paradox concealed within Pop Art lies in the
combination of its desire for rupture and its respect for the
art of the past. The structure of the exhibition aims to make
that connection evident, with galleries organised according to the classic genres of portraiture, still
life, history painting and landscape, displaying the work of leading figures of American and British Pop
alongside that of Spanish, Italian, German and French artists who shared a similar attitude.
Collage, Advertising, Comics
The Independent Group was founded in Britain in 1952,
comprising critics, architects and artists and based around
the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. It aimed to
stimulate artistic debate and to reflect on objects and
images from popular culture, encouraging the creation of
works that moved away from both the languages of the
European avant-gardes and from American Abstract
Expressionism. While it is generally considered that it was
the critic Lawrence Alloway who coined the term “pop”, it
was Richard Hamilton, another member of the group, who
first introduced the term into his famous collage of 1956
entitled Just what was it that made yesterday’s homes so
different, so appealing? and who, one year later, would
define it as an art that is “popular, transient, expendable,
low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, glamorous and
Big Business” in a letter to his fellow group members, after
which it became their guiding concept.
Included at the start of the exhibition is a 1992 version of Hamilton’s famous collage, in which a body-
builder holds up an enormous lollipop with the word “POP” (part of the name of American Tootsie
Roll Pop sweets) in a modern interior featuring a tv set, a framed comic, a tape recorder and a
vacuum cleaner, among other items, all of which represent an ideal world of domestic items of
consumer culture only to be seen in England at that date in American magazines. The Scottish artist
Eduardo Paolozzi was also part of this group of pioneering British Pop artists. Between 1947 and 1952
he produced his series Bunk!, of which three are included in the exhibition. Made from glossy
American magazines, comic strips and adverts, they reflect the same approach of transforming
American glamour into an ironic image. Hamilton and Paolozzi’s collages launched Pop Art, which did
not appear in the United States until the early years of the following decade.
Andy Warhol emerged as an artist via advertising and
comics, working as an illustrator and advertising designer for
publications such as Glamour and Harper’s Bazaar and for
Miller Shoes. Around 1960 and following parallel paths, both
Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein began to represent characters
from comics in their paintings, enlarging the comic strip
images and transforming them into large-format
compositions. Using images and techniques from comic
strips (with their characteristic grid of stencilled dots known
as the Ben-Day technique but applied manually),
Lichtenstein rebelled against the painterly gesture and
texture of his Abstract Expressionist predecessors and
explored the complex connections between art and popular
culture. While at first sight these seem nothing more than
enlarged comic strip images, a careful analysis reveals a
unique and highly personal portrait of the new America.
Look Mickey, Forget It! Forget Me! Vicki or Mr. Bellamy,
which open the exhibition, are outstanding examples of
how Lichtenstein transformed banal images into authentic
examples of art.
Emblems
From the mid-20th century onwards, the rapid growth of the mass media flooded everyday life with
slogans and brand names that were endlessly repeated on television, in the press and on luminous
billboards. As might be expected, they became an unlimited source of visual ideas for Pop artists.
From Jasper Johns and Peter Blake’s famous “Targets” to Warhol’s brand names, these signs and
symbols filled Pop Art.
The exhibition includes works of the importance of Green Target
by Johns, Big Torn Campbell’s Soup Can (Black Beans) and Brillo
Soap Pads Box by Warhol, together with others such as Epiphany
by Richard Hamilton, Coca-Cola by Mario Schiafano and The
Electric EAT by Robert Indiana. It also includes S&H Green
Stamps, in which Warhol transformed an everyday item into a
symbol. With that series, together with others on postage stamps
and dollar bills, Warhol moved away from Johns’s gesturalism
through the use of repetitive, mechanical compositions, covering
the entire surface of the canvas by stencil or photomechanical
silkscreen and thus introducing the concept of repetition that
would become his trademark. A similarly serial approach is to be
found in Pool Mantra by Joe Tilson, another pioneering figure of
British Pop Art who explored the artistic potential of the grid as a
resource in his compositions constructed from words.
Myths
Hollywood was a myth-making machine and the Pop artists used
many of these myths as motifs: the Italian Mimmo Rotella portrayed
Elizabeth Taylor as Queen of the Nile in Cleopatra while Ray
Johnson, one of the first artists to include music and film stars in the
small collages that he produced in the 1950s, immortalised Marlon
Brando and James Dean. British artists also combined the media
power of the great American idols with specific aspects of their own
popular culture, creating works on British myths such as The Beatles
and the Rolling Stones (The 1962 Beatles, by Blake; Release, by
Hamilton).
Rather than making portraits, Warhol fabricated icons, transforming
the identities of his sitters into a frozen, de-personalised image
through his manipulation of photography. In his portraits of Marilyn
Monroe and other celebrities whom the general public had
transformed into myths, Warhol offered an innovative approach to
the relationship between image and prototype through the new
technique of photomechanical silkscreen. In addition, as evident in
Marilyn Monroe in Black and White (Twenty-Five Marilyns), the permanent repetition of the image
further enhanced the power of the mythical figure, now transformed into an object of veneration.
Portraits
The emergence of Pop Art gave rise to a new interpretation of portraiture. The media and
mechanical techniques changed the relationship between individual subjectivity and collective
consciousness and artists surpassed the limits of the original when reinterpreting pre-existing images.
What arose was a new and meditated commitment with the very idea of the image, which could be
interpreted as a questioning of individuality in favour of the stereotypical or anonymity.
Andy Warhol created another version of
himself based on simulation. Not only did he
change his name but he also erased his past
and transformed his physical appearance. In
his innumerable self-portraits he thus masked
himself behind different images that replace
the real one. From 1968 onwards Warhol
introduced a reflection on death into his
painting and his new self-portraits became
veritable memento mori. The exhibition
includes a significant number of these, such
as Self-Portrait Strangulation and Self-Portrait
with Skull.
Pop Art portraits frequently make use of photographs and magazine images in their creation. This is
the case with Self-Portrait with Blue Guitar by David Hockney, Portrait of David Hockney in a
Hollywood Spanish Interior by Peter Blake, and Reflected Man by Allen Jones.
Landscapes, interiors, still lifes
Together with portraiture, Pop artists also evolved their own
particular interpretation of landscape, interior views and the
still life, transforming art history into an inexhaustible image
bank. Impressionist and Expressionist landscape and the
American landscape tradition came together in Pop’s
mechanised vision, evident for example in Yellow Sky by Roy
Lichtenstein or Ed Ruscha’s urban landscapes, which were
inspired by the large cities on the American West Coast.
Both interior views and the still life emerged in 17th-century
Holland as independent pictorial genres. In the Pop era, the
traditional interiors of Dutch painting, in which the space is
logically constructed from geometrical forms then
manipulated by the painter in order to fabricate metaphors
on everyday life that transmit moral concepts, became the
modern domestic interiors by Patrick Caulfield and Valerio
Adami to be seen in the exhibition.
However, the genre that enjoyed a new Golden Age under
Pop Art was undoubtedly the still life. In the Pop era objects
are to be found everywhere, in consumer products, in
magazine illustrations, in advertising, etc, becoming a
communicatory symbol. The domestic, private space of
the traditional still life and the artificial composition
constructed by the artist in the studio in early avant-
garde examples now becomes a commercial, public
space. Still Life # 34 by Tom Wesselmann, Untitled
(Vase II) by Sigmar Polke, Three Machines by Wayne
Thiebaud, Cup of Coffee by Lichtenstein, Kleenex Box
by Allen Jones, and Pancakes and Sausages by Claes
Oldenburg are just some of the outstanding examples
brought together in this gallery. They reveal to what
extent Pop Art made the objects and symbols of
consumer culture visible, elevating them to the
category of icons of modern life.
Urban eroticism
The profound change of attitudes and social norms introduced by the sexual revolution affected all
areas of life in western society. As a result, the media became inundated with erotic metaphors
involving seductive women and attractive men, which were immediately assimilated into Pop’s visual
repertoire. Hamilton’s famous collage already featured an overt reference to the new body culture
and to the artificial sensuality of the pin-up girl on the sofa. Richard Lindner, Allen Jones, R.B. Kitaj,
Tom Wesselmann, James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol and numerous other artists associated with Pop
Art participated in the exhibition Erotic Art 66. Held that year at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York,
it aimed to emphasise the obsessive presence of the new society’s eroticism in art.
Here again, the iconography of advertising and the mass media
was one of the principal sources of inspiration. Among the most
frequently recurring themes was the image of the woman as a
publicity device and consumer object, as in the work of James
Rosenquist with his seductive women depicted in bright colours,
smiling or smoking, or Tom Wesselmann and his modern
Odalisques from his series Great American Nudes, in which the
artist only used the colours of the American flag and other
national symbols such as the stars and stripes, as well as
photographs and historical portraits.
Also present in the exhibition is the vision of female sexuality
from a woman’s viewpoint, exemplified in the work of Pauline
Brody; the emergence of eroticism in comics with Roy
Lichtenstein; David Hockney’s homoerotic images; and the
satirical vision of consumerism and the banality of appearances
in the German artist Gerhard Richter’s images. The same satirical
note is to be found in the eroticised world of Richard Lindner, an
artist of German origin. Lindner’s distinctive pictorial language with its bright, colourful palette,
conceals a mordant social critique of the de-humanisation of modern life.
History Painting
Historical events or significant contemporary ones were equally crucial for Pop iconography. The
legacy of history painting and the profusion and immediate dissemination of any news event through
the media offered artists a unique opportunity to reassess and reinterpret present and past events
through the new artistic media.
Andy Warhol was a true chronicler of his times: man’s arrival on
the moon or Kennedy’s assassination through the depiction of
his widow Jackie are some of the examples on display in this
gallery. The patriotism that arose from the desire to reinforce
American identity in the post-war period and the precarious
balance of world power are issues that appear in the work of
artists such as the American Robert Rauschenberg (Retroactive
II), the Italian Mimmo Rotella (Viva America), and the Swede
Öyvind Fahlström (Red Seesaw).
In Spain, the absence of a legitimate democracy under the
Franco regime gave rise to increasing political conflict and social
discontent, which was also reflected in art. Eduardo Arroyo’s
painting and that of Equipo Crónica represents an ironic attack
on the system and on the collective historical amnesia that
characterised Spain at this period, while Juan Genovés’s The
Embrace became the quintessential image of the amnesty and a
symbol of the Transition.
Art About Art
With the rise of Pop, for the first time the art of the past became an artistic motif as well as a way to
incorporate pre-existing images and pose questions on the evolution of the contemporary gaze on
artistic representation.
The works of the Old Masters soon began to be
reproduced using photo-mechanical techniques by
Rauschenberg, Wesselmann and Warhol. David
Hockney’s Renaissance Head, a Pop version of a typical
15th-century profile portrait; Luncheon on the Grass,
Alain Jacquet’s interpretation of Manet’s famous
painting; The Living Room, an adaptation by Equipo
Crónica of Velázquez’s Las Meninas; Dressed Man
Descending a Staircase by Eduardo Arroyo, which is a
parody of Duchamp; Man in a Museum (or You’re in the
Wrong Movie) by Hockney; and Girl with Tear III by
Lichtenstein are some of the works that conclude this
survey, exemplifying these artists’ rethinking of the art of
the past.
ASSOCIATED ACTIVITIES
In conjunction with the exhibition, the Museum has organised a wide-ranging calendar of activities.
Together with the agreement it has reached with the Museo Reina Sofía to offer a combined ticket
that includes entry to the latter’s retrospective on Richard Hamilton, the result will be a true “Pop Art
summer” in Madrid.
“Pop Art Study Days”: a scholarly encounter has been scheduled for 10
and 11 July, which will debate the issues proposed in the exhibition by
its curator Paloma Alarcó. These Study Days will benefit from the
participation of art historians, university professors, museum
professionals and artists, including Guillermo Solana, Francisco Calvo
Serraller, Tomàs Llorens, Valeriano Bozal, Thomas Crow, Bernardo Pinto
de Almeida and Darío Villalba.
Film cycle: on Saturdays from June to September the Museum will be
showing a series of films associated with the Pop movement, including
Rebel without a Cause (1955) by Nicholas Ray, The Wild One by László
Benedek (1953) and Forbidden Planet (1956) by Fred Wilcox. Films will
be shown in their original language. Free entry until all seats filled.
Pop Art concerts: a number of musical events in conjunction with the
exhibition are also programmed for this summer, aimed at both the adult public and children. Free
entry in all cases.
Curator: Paloma Alarcó, Head of Modern Painting, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
Technical curators: Marta Ruiz del Árbol and Carlota Luelmo, Department of Modern Painting, Museo
Thyssen-Bornemisza
Number of works: 103
Publications: catalogue with texts by Paloma Alarcó, Francisco Calvo Serraller and Thomas Crow,
published in Spanish and English editions, 38 euros in Softcover and 42 euros in Hardcover; short
explanatory guide; digital publication on the Quisco Thyssen app for tablets and smartphones, in
English and Spanish; comic book, Myths of Pop by Miguel Ángel Martín, inspired by the exhibition.
More information and images:
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza – Press Office. Paseo del Prado, 8. 28014 Madrid. Tel. +34 914 203 944 /913 600 236.
Fax +34 914 202 780. prensa@museothyssen.org; www.museothyssen.org;
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
Paseo del Prado, 8. 28014 Madrid
Opening times: Tuesdays to Saturdays, 10am to 10pm. Mondays and Sundays, 10am to 7pm.
Last entry 1 hour 30 minutes before closing time
Ticket prices:
Temporary exhibition:
• Standard ticket: 11 Euros
• Reduced price ticket: 7 Euros for visitors aged over 65, pensioners, students with proof of status and Large Families
• Free entry: children aged under 12 and unemployed Spanish citizens with official proof of status
Temporary exhibition + Permanent Collection:
• Standard ticket: 17 Euros
• Reduced price ticket: 9 Euros
• Free entry: children aged under 12 and unemployed Spanish citizens with official proof of status
Entradas #MadridEsPop: combined entry ticket for the exhibition Pop Art Myths (Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza) and Richard Hamilton (Museo Nacional Reina Sofía, 27 June to 13 October), with the collaboration of the City Council of Madrid: 13 Euros.