=Books Recently Read=

Pop Art Book by black dog publishing. Curiously devoid of any authorial or editorial credits, as well as any copyright page that I could find—though admittedly I didn't look very hard beyond the places you'd expect to find them—I don't even remember where I got this book from, except that my husband bought it for me at a museum shop during a trip somewhere or other and I finished reading it on a trip this weekend for his birthday to Lambertville, NJ/New Hope, PA. I suppose it's somewhat apropos that no author or editor is credited for a book on an art movement that relied so heavily on the appropriation of already existing materials as Pop Art did. 

Filled with fun stuff, like postcards you can cut out and mail, transparent color overlays, cardboard masks and fold-outs, this book attempts to convey not only the history and spirit of Pop Art but to become a kind of Pop Art object itself with its lavish full-page illustrations, art reproductions, its variety of layouts, typefaces and type colors. The book is organized in an A to Z format, to which it doesn't strain itself to adhere, leaving out plenty of the alphabet along the way, including XYZ. There's nothing so tedious as an author stretching to come up with a subject for the letter "X." The entries seek to cover the range of concerns that motivated and inspired Pop Artists, for instance, supermarkets, comics, advertising, automobiles, celebrities, the Cold War, the civil rights movement, Vietnam, youth culture, and the space race.

This book is a broad introductory survey, best suited to someone who thinks of Pop Art pretty much exclusively in terms of Andy Warhol, with a little Roy Lichtenstein thrown in. Whoever—or whatever—assembled this book seeks to correct this mistaken Warholcentric view by gathering together a wide array of Pop and proto-pop artists, showing that the movement, though influenced by American culture, actually had it's genesis in England with the Independent Group circa 1952. Eduardo Paolozzi, Pauline Boty, Peter Blake, Joe Tilson, Derek Boshier, Colin Self, Nicholas Monro, and, of course, Richard Hamilton are some of the Brits prominently mentioned. I'm sorry to say that my art education is so full of black holes of ignorance I only heard of 25% of these people before picking up the Pop Art Book. Among the Americans not named Andy Warhol or Roy Lichtenstein, you have Larry Rivers, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist Allan D'Arcangelo, Robert Indiana, Mel Ramos, and Jim Dine. Here my percentage of ignorance, thankfully, declines a little.

A fun way to learn more about a fun art movement, this is a great book to take with you on a weekend vacation when you know that you just aren't going to be able to muster the concentration necessary to take on Heidegger's Being and Time, or if you normally have the attention span of a 15-second television commercial, or, like me, it's a case of both.