The first museum survey of American pop art debuts - September 25th, 1962

On this day in 1962, a new exhibit opened at the Pasadena Art Museum in southern California, marking what’s believed to be the very first museum showing of Pop art.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of I
Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to This Day in History Class,
a show for those who can never know enough about history.
I'm Gabe Bluesier, and in this episode, we're looking at
the origins of pop art, including the turning point when

(00:21):
it appeared in the gallery of an American museum for
the first time. The day was September nineteen sixty two.
A new exhibit opened at the Pasadena Art Museum in
southern California, marking what's believed to be the very first

(00:45):
museum showing of pop art. Titled New Painting of Common Objects,
the exhibit featured eight up and coming artists Jim Dine,
Robert Dowd, Philip Hefferton, Roy Lichtenstein, Edward Rouche, Joe Good,
Wayne Tebow, and Andy Warhol. The art show was the

(01:07):
brainchild of the museum's curator, Walter Hopps. He noticed the
growing trend of paintings depicting everyday objects and decided to
showcase this new style of art by bringing together pop
artists from the East and West coasts. But what exactly
defined this new style of art and where had it

(01:27):
come from? The roots of pop art can be traced
back to the post war boom of the nineteen fifties,
when renewed optimism and rebounding economies led to the development
of a more consumerist culture in both the United States
and Western Europe. One result of this boom in manufacturing
and media was that people began to question the dominant

(01:50):
traditions that had shaped culture up to that point. For example,
in the world of contemporary art, abstract expressionism was the
dominant sty aisle of the day, characterized by sweeping brush
strokes and a sense of spontaneity. This new form of
abstract art was popularized around the world by artists such

(02:10):
as Jackson Pollock and Willem Dacooning. But as the Cultural
Revolution marched on, a new generation of artists began to
reject abstract expressionism in favor of a more figurative style,
soon to be known as pop art. The term pop
was derived from popular art and was first used in

(02:32):
the mid nineteen fifties to describe a group of British
artists who satirized the imagery of American consumerism, especially it's advertising.
By the early nineteen sixties, the term had become synonymous
with an American art movement that also focused on elements
from mass media and popular culture, but with a much

(02:53):
less critical eye. Unlike their British counterparts, American pop artists
were not viewing the world of American advertising from a distance.
They lived with it in their daily lives, and we're
mostly interested in presenting these common objects in bold, graphic
new ways, without the need for explicit social commentary. After all,

(03:16):
most American pop artists began their careers in commercial art.
For example, Andy Warhol found success as a graphic designer
and magazine illustrator, while James Rosenquist got his start as
a billboard painter. This commercial work not only gave the
artists a crash course in the visual language of mainstream culture,

(03:37):
it also helped them identify potential points of overlap between
the high art found in museums and the low culture
of consumer products and advertising. The result of this was
an art movement that sought to blur the line between
high and low. Pop artists employed a level of technical
skill and design ability that was comparable to traditional fine artists,

(04:02):
but the subjects of pop art were objects of mass
culture like soup cans or media stars like Marilyn Monroe.
These works were strongly inspired by product packaging and advertisements
of the day, as well as by the illustrations and
typefaces seen in television, movies, comic books, and magazines. The

(04:25):
pop movement seemed to be saying that art can emerge
from any source and should not be limited to an
accepted list of styles or subjects. But pop art wasn't
just rebellion for rebellion's sake, and it wasn't a ringing
endorsement of capitalism either. It was a way to hold
up a mirror to the trends and obsessions of modern

(04:47):
society and examine what the reflections say about the people
who value them. The pop art exhibit at the Pasadena
Art Museum closed after just three weeks, but that was
an to establish precedent, and it wasn't long until pop
art became an expected staple of art museums all over
the world. The styles popularity waned a bit in the

(05:11):
nineties seventies, when it was supplanted by the rise of
installation and performance art. It's gone through a few revivals
since then, and today you can find examples of contemporary
pop art and the work of artists like Shepherd Fairy,
Keetna Patel and banks E. Their work carries on the
pop art tradition by using bold graphic design and easy

(05:34):
to identify subjects to comment on or satirize the shape
of human society as we know it today. I'm Gay
Lousier and hopefully you now know a little more about
art history today than you did yesterday. If you enjoyed
the show, consider following us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram

(05:55):
at t d i HC Show, And if you have
any comments or suggest gent's for us, you can send
them to This Day at I heart media dot com.
Thanks as always to Chandler Mays for producing the show,
and thank you for listening. I'll see you back here
again tomorrow for another Day in History class. For more

(06:24):
podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.