POP ART REDEFINED, 1971
signed Eduardo Paolozzi and numbered 37/100 lower right in pencil
screenprint and collage on paper
35.4 x 19.1cm; (55.8 x 39.3cm sheet)
unframed

It is a fact worth overstating that Pop Art, a movement which alongside Abstract Expressionism placed the United States at the top of the post-War art ecosystem and made household names of Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and Tom Wesselman, was born and cultivated in London. Without Eduardo Paolozzi, Richard Hamilton and a small handful of artists associated with the Independent Group art history charts a totally different course. The real genesis of this movement lies in a series of collages Paolozzi assembled from American magazines given to him by GIs during his time in Paris, the earliest dating from 1947. The Group shared a mutual fascination with the mass culture then arriving from America: advertising, space-age science fiction, magazines. In a striking juxtaposition to the privations experienced in Britain at the time, (bomb sites littering the cities, rationing, the very present relics of a cataclysmic war) the appeal of this sundrenched, hopeful utopia was obvious.

What came to distinguish the British work produced at this time is a certain distance from its own subject matter: American Pop looked at American abundance from within, guided by its familiarity with the subject, while London investigated through a more anthropological and analytical prism, laced with irony. Both avenues in many ways also coloured by their respective national character traits.

In the early 1970s Paolozzi turned his attention to this trans-Atlantic back and forth. In Lots of Art, Lots of Fun, 1971, Lichtenstein, Warhol and Jasper Johns are all subjected to his attack on their perceived role as artists, closer perhaps to Disney illustrators than true creatives. In the present work, Pop Art Redefined, Frank Stella is excoriated as Paolozzi bitingly compares the work to that of a painting chimpanzee; his hard-edge art equated to no more than colouring in.