One of the first portraits that visitors will see in the new National Portrait Gallery show Pop Art Portraits is Roy Lichtenstein’s In the Car, 1963. It is a well-known image depicting a glamorous couple speeding along in a car, but it is far from a conventional portrait. The pair – he with his glossy blue-black hair and chiselled chin, she with her retroussé nose and outsize eyes – are fantasy people from a comic strip, enlarged hugely and recreated with the coarse dots used for printing cheap comics.
To many this is not a portrait at all, and its early inclusion in the show looks like deliberate provocation. But it serves to accentuate the exhibition’s theme, which is to show how the Pop Art movement of the 1950s and 1960s reengaged with portraiture and set out a new template for the representation of the individual. That template has, to a great extent, endured to this day.
The Pop Art movement reinvigorated portraiture after a period dominated by Abstract Expressionism. Those artists had been a self-referential, inward-looking lot, for whom any figurative depiction of an individual was anathema. Portraiture was a dirty word.
Starting in Britain in the early 1950s and in the United States in the mid1950s, the emerging Pop Art movement began to drag art back into the real world, using portraiture to do it. “The received wisdom on Pop Art,” says the show’s curator, Paul Moorhouse, “is that it’s all about objects, about still life, about scrutinising the nature and language of consumer culture. It homes in on works such as Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans. Well, that’s only half the story. Of course Pop Art was about the material fabric of popular culture and trying to understand man’s changing state. But to understand that, the individual’s relationship with the new world of mass-produced objects had to be addressed.”
Pop Art is full of examples of individuals interacting with the objects of popular culture, such as Tom Wesselmann’s Great American Nude #27 of 1962, a flat, billboard-like painting in which a faceless nude woman reclines before a television and a line of ice-cream sundaes; or Richard Hamilton’s famous image, Just What is it that Makes Today’s Homes so Different, so Appealing? (1956), which [[ is full of individuals interacting with vacuum cleaners, radios, TVs and other trophies of modern 1950s life.
To many this is not a portrait at all, and its early inclusion in the show looks like deliberate provocation. But it serves to accentuate the exhibition’s theme, which is to show how the Pop Art movement of the 1950s and 1960s reengaged with portraiture and set out a new template for the representation of the individual. That template has, to a great extent, endured to this day.
The Pop Art movement reinvigorated portraiture after a period dominated by Abstract Expressionism. Those artists had been a self-referential, inward-looking lot, for whom any figurative depiction of an individual was anathema. Portraiture was a dirty word.
Starting in Britain in the early 1950s and in the United States in the mid1950s, the emerging Pop Art movement began to drag art back into the real world, using portraiture to do it. “The received wisdom on Pop Art,” says the show’s curator, Paul Moorhouse, “is that it’s all about objects, about still life, about scrutinising the nature and language of consumer culture. It homes in on works such as Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans. Well, that’s only half the story. Of course Pop Art was about the material fabric of popular culture and trying to understand man’s changing state. But to understand that, the individual’s relationship with the new world of mass-produced objects had to be addressed.”
Pop Art is full of examples of individuals interacting with the objects of popular culture, such as Tom Wesselmann’s Great American Nude #27 of 1962, a flat, billboard-like painting in which a faceless nude woman reclines before a television and a line of ice-cream sundaes; or Richard Hamilton’s famous image, Just What is it that Makes Today’s Homes so Different, so Appealing? (1956), which [[ is full of individuals interacting with vacuum cleaners, radios, TVs and other trophies of modern 1950s life.
Many classic Pop Art images reveal a fascination with portraits, not only of the obvious subjects – film stars, pop stars, models, politicians and other media heroes – but also of anonymous people, all taken from mass media sources. Warhol’s flat and unemotional portraits of Marilyn Monroe and of Elvis are in the show, as well as a portrait by Richard Hamilton of John F. Kennedy in an astronaut’s helmet, and a series by Robert Rauschenberg of Kennedy surrounded by new, high-tech paraphernalia of the 1960s: the astronaut, the speedometer, the Coca-Cola logo, the helicopter, the neon jungle of a New York street.
“The portrait made a triumphant return with Pop Art,” says Moorhouse, “and it has retained its position ever since. Many of the issues of the 1960s – of new technology, consumerism, fame and celebrity – are still with us.”
We still see that cool, detached approach in portraiture today, in the flat, uninflected style that is ruthlessly factual, almost to the extent of imitating the signwriters’ art. Tom Phillips, whose best-known work is probably his dry, dispassionate portrait of Iris Murdoch, is one artist who has traced and extended Pop Art’s varied legacies. Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami also come to mind, but one of the most clear inheritors is Julian Opie, whose portraits have those flat, emotionless qualities, employing Pop’s basic tenet of using today’s technology and media. His latest self-portrait is a digitally operated moving image with simplified features. The language is derived intentionally from Pop.
Today’s Pop Art is still about life and death, about our intoxication with glamour and detachment from it. It is about how we live and look in a media-drenched age. If Warhol were still alive, he would probably be working on a searching portrait of Kate McCann.
We still see that cool, detached approach in portraiture today, in the flat, uninflected style that is ruthlessly factual, almost to the extent of imitating the signwriters’ art. Tom Phillips, whose best-known work is probably his dry, dispassionate portrait of Iris Murdoch, is one artist who has traced and extended Pop Art’s varied legacies. Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami also come to mind, but one of the most clear inheritors is Julian Opie, whose portraits have those flat, emotionless qualities, employing Pop’s basic tenet of using today’s technology and media. His latest self-portrait is a digitally operated moving image with simplified features. The language is derived intentionally from Pop.
Today’s Pop Art is still about life and death, about our intoxication with glamour and detachment from it. It is about how we live and look in a media-drenched age. If Warhol were still alive, he would probably be working on a searching portrait of Kate McCann.
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