Pop! Art in a Changing Britain
Imagine (or think back to) growing up in post-war Britain. Ration coupons. Rain-slick streets. Bombed-out terraces of dingy brick. And then, shimmering on the horizon, the prospect of salvation: American popular culture. Who needs spirit-sapping austerity when Elvis Presley can cheer you up?
This is the situation in which the artists featured in Pop! Art in a Changing Britain, a new exhibition at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, found themselves. Forged in beige, drizzle-drenched Britain, they were drawn inexorably to the Technicolor uplands of consumerism.
Featuring 168 artworks, the densely hung exhibition showcases the collection of British Pop Art acquired by the architect Colin St John (“Sandy”) Wilson and his wife and fellow architect, MJ Long. In 2006, the couple donated more than 500 works to Pallant House, providing another 350 pieces on long-term loan.
Since then, the gallery has mounted several exhibitions on Pop Art, but there has never been a comprehensive presentation of its impressive Pop holdings – until now, though the story told is a traditional version of an already familiar tale. We begin in the late Forties and Fifties, with the pioneering generation of artists who forged British Pop, including Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi and Nigel Henderson. The latter’s
Screen (1949-52 and 1960), a series of madcap collages stuck onto four wooden panels, is a sort of blueprint for what would coalesce as the “Pop” approach: deliberately mixing high and low culture (here a Titian nude, there a zebra), announcing a mischievous new energy, which many later British Pop artists would share. In the same gallery, Hamilton’s famous 1958 picture Hers is a Lush Situation brainily deconstructs the seductive visual strategies of mass-media advertising, as Sophia Loren’s collaged lips hover above sleek, aerodynamic lines evoking an American Buick.
The artists who came next, whom we meet in the following galleries, mostly took a different, less cerebral tack. During the Fifties, for instance, Peter Blake fashioned a highly personal form of Pop Art, infused by nostalgia for Victoriana and native pastimes, such as the fairground. By the early Sixties, a third wave, including David Hockney and Allen Jones, no longer saw popular culture as a sort of miracle, to be analysed from afar. For them, it was immediate: an indispensable part of everyday life.
The curious thing about this exhibition, which tails off with a vague, off-message final gallery about developments during the late Sixties and Seventies, is that, by the end, you may feel confused about what British Pop Art really was. Indeed, on the evidence presented here, the “movement” was an infinitely various phenomenon, characterised by artists with different, even conflicting agendas and predilections. I struggled to see how several artworks, such as Colin Self ’s oil painting Waiting Women and Two Nuclear Bombers (Handley Page Victors) (1962-63), could be defined as “Pop” at all.
Perhaps, then, Pop is best defined as an attitude, not a style – one already palpable in Henderson’s Screen – which, in keeping with wider shifts in British society, wished to topple time-honoured certainties.
At least, this is the impression left by the Pallant House exhibition. For all its playful exuberance and the enduring relevance of its themes (celebrity, the impact of technology, concerns about international politics), the show suggests that, as a movement, “British Pop Art” was too elusive for the label to have much meaning, as a catch-all term, today.
From Sat until May 7. Information: 01243 774557; pallant.org.uk
‘By the end of this exhibition, you may feel confused about what British Pop Art really was’