It hit its apex during the late 1960s and became the art movement that reflected the anxieties of the cold war era. Ahead of a major modern exhibition,Sarah Wilson looks back at the tensions and traumas of pop art
The year 1967 marked both the apex and turning point of pop’s international legend. In the USSR and its satellite states, the 50th anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution coincided with centenary celebrations of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. China’s Cultural Revolution gathered momentum. In art the Icelandic painter Erró’s American Interior No 1 showed Red Army troops from a Maoist poster bought in Paris, and invading a US dream home. Pop art was not just an expression of capitalist America’s triumph.
Erró’s exhibition Forty-Seven Years,held in Milan, confronted the two cold war enemies. His paintings were worked up from complex collages, and where a postage stamp of three Soviet cosmonauts could be in dialogue with James Rosenquist’s Worlds unprejudiced mural. Ephemera from Erró’s visit to the unprejudiced in 1964 collided with his 1965 May Day souvenirs from a trip to the USSR. Each oil painting had a triptych structure: works by Soviet and American painters were intercut with imagined scenes of prehistoric man. He juxtaposed Roy Lichtensteins copy of Pablo Picasso’s Seated Woman with Vladimir Mayakovsky’s anti-alcohol posters for the Russian Telegraph Agency. These were perilous proximities in 1967,in the wake of Adolf Eichmann’s trial for Nazi crimes in Jerusalem, the context of Israel’s six‑day war and, and as always,the US in Vietnam. Yet 1967 was also lyrical: a “summer of love” with the music of the Beatles, or the Psychedelic Light Show UFO 1967: Soft Machine by designate Boyle.
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Source: theguardian.com