Pop Art arrived in the middle of the 20th century, as artists experimented with pictures and processes borrowed from mass media. Their high-low mashups, nostalgic references, and high-octane colors remain alluring, relevant, and surprisingly misunderstood. In time for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s retrospective on Roy Lichtenstein, read these five books to revisit the significant cultural movement and track its continual reinvention.
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The Long March of Pop: Art, Music, and Design 1930–1995
Art movements tend to be situated as hard breaks with their immediate past, but great art historians address how a movement is drawn out of the world it inherits. In The Long March of Pop, Thomas Crow argues that Pop artists were forged in post-World War II classrooms that welcomed a surge of veterans and explored the “image worlds” of American folk art as source material. He organizes the text with chapters on key artists (Robert Indiana, James Rosenquist, and Robert Rauschenberg among them), but his analysis radiates out to include Americana treasures from surfboards to Woody Guthrie songs.
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Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists 1958–1968
Appraisals of Pop art’s visual characteristics rapidly and narrowly consolidated around men, forcing women artists to the margins of the movement’s propulsive trajectory. Seductive Subversion provides exacting observations of how the art world excluded such artists as Pauline Boty, Faith Ringgold, and Marjorie Strider, who fit the formal cues of Pop art so precisely that one is reminded of rampant sexism and racism as well. But where this catalog for a traveling exhibition in 2010 really shines is when it cracks open the canon to argue for the Pop sensibilities of artists like Chryssa, Lee Lozano, and Alina Szapocznikow, who have largely been claimed by historians of other movements and styles.
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International Pop
Pop art is replete with images of consumer goods that, as this catalog for a 2015 Walker Art Center exhibition reminds us, circulate in a global marketplace. The rigorously researched compendium of essays, with a stellar timeline, dives deep into nation-specific histories of Pop from countries spanning the Americas, Asia, and Europe while also seriously considering the implications of the movement’s rise alongside American economic domination. This book is careening, festive, and incisive, bringing together a number of artists still overdue for solo museum shows. (Plus, Walker Art Center publications are always worth picking up for the design alone.)
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Image Duplicator: Roy Lichtenstein and the Emergence of Pop Art
Pop artists turned to images and processes borrowed from print advertising as interest in gestural and expressionistic mark-making waned. This shift reflects a set of concerns that remain relevant today, from the role of the artist in society to technological innovations’ impact on how we picture the world. Michael Lobel’s 2002 book sets itself apart in illuminating how such narratives surface in Roy Lichtenstein’s art, including an in-depth account of what is one of Pop art’s more fascinating origin stories. See: Lichtenstein’s training at Ohio State University’s “flash lab,” where students drew images that were screened in a blackout room for one-tenth of a second, effectively turning the body into a mechanical recording device.
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Andy Warhol Exhibits: A Glittering Alternative
Retail culture made its way into Pop art imagery and also influenced how artists and curators installed work, pulling inspiration from department store windows and marketing displays. This publication accompanied a 2020 exhibition in Vienna that focused on Andy Warhol’s approach, from maximalist wallpapers to towers of Brillo boxes. Come for the fascinating archival photographs but stay for the book’s last essay, by Jennifer Sichel: a groundbreaking reconsideration of Warhol’s conception of homosexuality based on recently discovered tapes of an early interview he did with the chronically underknown critic Gene Swenson. In Warhol’s intriguing appraisal, Pop art transcends a mere exploration of the consumer landscape into a radical field of queer desire. (Sichel also wrote Criticism Without Authority, a book focusing on Swenson and fellow queer critic Jill Johnston, published just last year.)