The Pop Revolution: How an Unlikely Concatenation of Artists, Aficionados, Businessmen, Critics, Curators, Collectors, Dealers, and Hangers-On Radically Transformed the Art World - Hardcover

Marquis, Alice Goldfarb

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0878467440 ISBN 13: 9780878467440

Publisher: MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2010

Synopsis

“This book is a social history of Pop art, a group portrait of both the artists and the people who made some of them rich and famous in just a few years, while setting in motion the drastically altered way art has been marketed and appreciated―in the monetary and aesthetic sense―up to the present day.” So begins Alice Goldfarb Marquis' lively, informative and entertaining account of one of the twentieth century's most flamboyant and influential art movements. Included in this group portrait are the famous: Roy Lichtenstein and his “Blam-Pow” comics panels, Andy Warhol, shy, shrewd and tough as nails, the power couple of Leo Castelli and Ileana Sonnabend; the infamous, such as the collector Robert Scull, who bought so heavily that his own dealer deemed him “vulgar”; and a variegated cast ranging from artists Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Indiana and James Rosenquist to pioneering dealer Ivan Karp, controversial curator Henry Geldzahler, media guru Marshall McLuhan, author Tom Wolfe and many, many others. While shelves of books have been written about Pop art, The Pop Revolution is the first to approach it not only as an aesthetic upheaval, but also as a bellwether for the social, cultural, economic and political changes affecting America and Europe in the late twentieth century. As Marquis notes, the figures involved in creating and promoting the movement “set off the ‘culture boom' of the 1960s, and were indispensable to the success, not only of Pop art, but of all the varied approaches to art that followed.” Rich in historical insights and unpublished information, The Pop Revolution is an extremely readable account of one of art's liveliest chapters.
Award-winning journalist and historian Alice Goldfarb Marquis, who died in 2009, was a visiting scholar at the University of California at San Diego. Her previous books include Art Czar: The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg, Marcel Duchamp: The Bachelor Stripped Bare, Alfred H. Barr, Jr: Missionary for the Modern and The Art Biz.

About this title

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

"This book is a social history of Pop Art, a group portrait of both the artists and the people who made some of them rich and famous in just a few years, while setting in motion the drastically altered way art is marketed and appreciated--in the monetary and aesthetic sense--up to the present day. The artists, their dealers, fans and patrons starred in a cultural revolution that still resonates today. Unheard-of prosperity encouraged people who had never been interested in art to flock to museums; and the line between avid art collectors and speculators blurred. Critics who for decades had guided the public's taste in art were suddenly brushed aside, tagged as hopelessly elitist; their colleagues in literature, sociology, politics and economics likewise overturned. After reigning for almost a century, the old Modernist creed, with its aesthetic theories, successive avant gardes, judgmental critics and arrogant upper crust, was fading. This changing of the cultural guard reflected a profound relaxation of previously ironclad rules, not only in art or literature, but also in behavior, dress, entertainment and personal fulfillment. Those who had endured the privations of the Depression and the horrors of the Second World War basked in new opportunities--for education, housing, the pleasures of a comfortable income and time to savor them. They set off the "culture boom" of the 1960s, and were indispensable to the success, not only of Pop art, but of all the varied approaches to art that followed.

Alice Goldfarb Marquis, excerpted from her introduction to The Pop Revolution: How an Unlikely Concatenation of Artists, Aficionados, Businessmen, Critics, Curators, Collectors, Dealers, and Hangers-On Radically Transformed the Art World.

Review:

Alice Goldfarb Marquis was an engaging combination of scholar and journalist critic with little use for the usual obfuscating language so common in the art world. Her eminently readable, anecdote-filled, and good-humored book insightfully describes a revolution Copernican in its impact. Before Pop, the art world resembled, say, the poetry world; afterward it looked an awful lot like the movie business. --Peter Plagens

It is wonderful to recall the period through this fresh and vivid text that is well written, insightful, focused, thoroughly researched, and informative. Marquis builds the narrative to describe the profound and enduring change in every sector of the art world. --Charles Hinman

I really relished Alice's book. It is the best account I have yet read of the New York art world in the Sixties. She fills in holes I did not realize existed, and writes without ideology or rancor, fully realizing that it was a cultural convulsion rather than just a period in the placid flow of art history. I learned from it so much that I had not known that I did not know, and was thrilled to encounter a quite authoritative account of my own role as a philosopher of art, dealing with work that demanded a whole new way of thought and practice - explosive, as Warhol would say, and inevitable. --Arthur Danto

About this edition

• Publisher: MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0878467440
• ISBN 13: 9780878467440
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 222