Pop art is the movement almost everyone recognizes without having studied it: a soup can, a comic strip panel, a famous face printed over and over. Behind those images stand painters, sculptors and printmakers who each moved the line between art and the things sold in shops, and some of them were nearly left out of the story.
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What Pop Asked of Its Artists
Pop art is art made from the pictures of mass culture: advertising, packaging, comics, movie stars and the news. It began in London in the early 1950s, when a circle of young artists, architects and critics, the Independent Group, argued at the Institute of Contemporary Arts that American cars, ads and films deserved as much attention as fine art.
By the late 1950s, New York artists had turned to the same material, and in 1962 a show called The New Realists, at the Sidney Janis Gallery, put the movement before the public.
The material was everywhere, and that was the difficulty. Billboards, packaging and newspapers covered every street with pictures that art schools treated as beneath notice. An artist who wanted them in a work had to decide what to do with them: copy them, enlarge them, mock them, love them, or turn them against the people who made them.
The twelve artists here each answered that question in a new way, and after each of them, art accepted something it had refused before. Three of them are women whose place in Pop was ignored for decades.
12. Pauline Boty (1938 to 1966)
Two broad panels of flat green close in on Marilyn Monroe from both sides, leaving her only a narrow strip in the middle of the canvas. The image comes from a press photograph for Some Like It Hot, and Pauline Boty painted The Only Blonde in the World in 1963, a year after the actress died.
In London at the time, the new Pop painting belonged to young men. Women filled their pictures, but as pin-ups and starlets cut out and pasted in. Boty worked beside those men instead. In 1962, when Ken Russell filmed four young London painters for Pop Goes the Easel, a BBC documentary, she was the only woman of the four.
What set her apart was the point of view. She painted the same film stars and pop idols as the men, but as a woman who admires them. Her Marilyn is a woman another woman found glamorous, hemmed in by two walls of green. I read those walls as the fame that closed in on her, though Boty left no explanation of them.
That painting nearly disappeared with her. Boty died of cancer in July 1966, at 28, and her canvases stayed at her brother's home in the country for almost thirty years. In 1993 the historian David Mellor found them and showed some in London. Since then, the early history of British Pop has had to be told again, with a woman painter inside it.
At a Glance
Born: 1938, Croydon, England
Died: 1966, London
Nationality: British
Known for: The only woman painter among the first British Pop artists
Where to see the work: Tate Britain, London
11. Corita Kent (1918 to 1986)
In 1962, a Catholic nun walked into a Los Angeles gallery, the Ferus. On the walls hung thirty-two canvases, each one a can of Campbell's soup. Corita Kent taught art at Immaculate Heart College nearby, and what she took away from those cans would soon set her against the archdiocese of Los Angeles.