Pop Art International: Far Beyond Warhol and Lichtenstein

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“Remember how insane the 1960s felt, every day?” someone asked me at a preview of the traveling exhibition “International Pop,” which is making its final stop here at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Absolutely I remember, and the show — brash, manic and acid-tinged — took me right back there.

Maybe because the name sounds snappy, Pop Art has a reputation for being light and bright, and some of it is: Roy Lichtenstein’s larky comic-strip outtakes, Andy Warhol’s “Silver Clouds.” But a lot of its images are grim: electric chairs, police dogs, fighter planes, body parts. Under Pop’s sleek veneer lay traces of the social and political pathogens that made the ’60s in America so jumpy. From day to day you never knew what disaster you’d wake up to.

Less familiar is Pop’s status internationally. And it did get around. It flourished, sometimes under other names, in Britain, France and Germany. It cropped up, at once embraced and mistrusted, in Argentina and Brazil, countries under the thumb of dictatorships; and in an Eastern Europe penned in by Soviet Communism; and in Japan, where memories of Hiroshima and the material rewards of Western occupation made for intensely conflicted art.

Introducing the histories of these far-flung versions of Pop is what the show — originally organized at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis by Darsie Alexander and Bartholomew Ryan, and in Philadelphia by Erica F. Battle — is primarily, and most interestingly, about. And that telling of those stories produces one visual surprise after another. For every classic, textbook item — a Jasper Johns flag painting, a Warhol Brillo box — there are dozens you’ve never laid eyes on. Collectively, they distill an era’s distinctive mix of earned paranoia and skeptical utopianism.

Although Pop is often thought of as American in origin, the earliest recorded use of the name was in Britain. According to the catalog, the British artist Richard Hamilton coined the term in 1957, by which time his fellow countryman Eduardo Paolozzi had been making the kind of art it described — in this case collages of daily news clips, magazine advertisements and soft porn — for more than 10 years. In 1958, the curator Lawrence Alloway, a transplant from London to New York, officially put Pop Art on the art historical record.

Pop marked a radical change in that record. It interrupted the trans-Atlantic dominance of moody, high-minded Abstract Expression with an unmetaphysical art of the everyday world. In 1960 the young Edward Ruscha, barely out of art school in Los Angeles, nailed the transition in a painting called “Felix,” in which the cartoon character Felix the Cat, inserted as crisp black-and-white photostat, grins broadly as he prepares to leap clear of confining bands of brushy red, white and blue paint.

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