Pop impressions

the long version

From the early 1960s through the early 1970s, Pop art swept the industrialized world. Iconoclastic, rebellious, and immediately popular, the new movement found its roots in an unprecedentedly prosperous consumer society. Encouraged by galleries and publishers who catered to a new collectors' market, many Pop artists were drawn to the creation of editions on paper and in multiples. The Prints and Illustrated Books Collection at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, is a rich repository of this work. Here, 60 vibrant examples by such American icons as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, and by such Europeans as Richard Hamilton, Niki de Saint Phalle, Gerhard Richter, Eduardo Paolozzi, and Sigmar Polke, are organized by mass media consumer culture, politics, erotica, and other themes. Wendy Weitman's introductory essay emphasizes the intense interchange among young artists that led to a ricochet of Pop imagery and ideology back and forth across the Atlantic.