Pop Art: The John and Kimiko Powers Collection

With a giant, soft drum set by Claes Oldenburg, a white alphabet by Jasper Johns, a combine painting with radio attached by Robert Rauschenburg, a halved peach, Buick, naked lady (all together) by James Rosenquist, rows of Campbell's soup cans by Andy Warhol, pin-up girls by Mel Ramos, and a graphic explosion by Roy Lichtenstein, the works gathered here pack more of a big bang than a mere pop. With signature pieces by the movement's stars, the John and Kimiko Powers Collection of Pop Art is considered one of the most extensive in private hands. Accompanied by individual essays on each of the represented artists.

Jim Dine was born in Cincinnati in 1935 and made his entrance into the New York art world in the late 1950s. His paintings, drawings, photographs and sculpture have since been shown at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Guggenheim Museum, New York. Dine has taught art at Yale, Oberlin and Cornell.

Jasper Johns was born in 1930 in South Carolina, where he grew up wanting to be an artist. Emerging in the late 50s as a force in the American art scene, his richly worked paintings of maps, flags, and targets led the artistic community away from abstract expressionism toward a new emphasis on the concrete, paving the way for Pop Art and minimalism. The artist lives and works in New York.

One of the most beloved of American pop artists, Roy Lichtenstein was born in 1923 in New York, and studied there at the Art Students League and later at Ohio State University, during which he completed a three-year tour of duty in the army. His early work was based on American genre and history painting, and took on Cubist and Expressionist styles. His first proto-Pop work was created in 1956; his first pop 'Brushstroke' painting appeared in 1965. Lichtenstein died in 1997.

Born into a diplomatic family in 1929 in Stockholm, Sweden, Claes Oldenburg lived in the United States and Norway before settling in Chicago in 1936, and becoming a citizen in 1953. He studied Literature and Art History at Yale University and Studio Art at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1956, he moved to New York and met several artists making early Performance work, including George Brecht, Allan Kaprow, George Segal and Robert Whitman. Oldenburg soon became a prominent figure in Happenings and Performance art during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Over the past three decades, his work has been the subject of many solo exhibitions, including at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Oldenburg lives in New York.

Mel Ramos was born in Sacramento, California, in 1935. His work has long been considered of the West Coast pop variety and has been exhibited in most major museums around the world.