The Heritage of Pop

Heritage of Pop RUTH BERENSON

SIX-FOOT-WIDE HAMBURGER made from vinyl; a_ billboard-sized nude with nipples the size of ice cream cones; Soup, a six- by eight- foot canvas covered with identical Campbell’s Soup cans; a frame of a comic strip magnified twenty times, complete with ballooned blurb and stenciled dots for newsprint shadings —this was Pop (short for popular) art. It took as its raw material the commonplace banalities of the Ameri- can scene—hillboards, comics, groc- ery displays, brassiére ads. Sometimes the artist altered the raw material, more often he just enlarged it or re- produced it intact. This “New Real- ism,” as it was sometimes called, burst upon the art scene in 1962, at once scandalizing and titillating audiences hitherto accustomed to shudder at any and everything smacking of the vulgarly commercial and the low- brow.

Heritage of Pop RUTH BERENSON

SIX-FOOT-WIDE HAMBURGER made from vinyl; a_ billboard-sized nude with nipples the size of ice cream cones; Soup, a six- by eight- foot canvas covered with identical Campbell’s Soup cans; a frame of a comic strip magnified twenty times, complete with ballooned blurb and stenciled dots for newsprint shadings —this was Pop (short for popular) art. It took as its raw material the commonplace banalities of the Ameri- can scene—hillboards, comics, groc- ery displays, brassiére ads. Sometimes the artist altered the raw material, more often he just enlarged it or re- produced it intact. This “New Real- ism,” as it was sometimes called, burst upon the art scene in 1962, at once scandalizing and titillating audiences hitherto accustomed to shudder at any and everything smacking of the vulgarly commercial and the low- brow.