Pop

Edited by an internationally recognized expert on Pop art and culture, this book surveys Pop across all artforms and gives equal coverage to its American, British and European manifestations.

Survey: Renowned scholar and critic Hal Foster contributes the survey essay which focuses on the Pop image as it developed over the period: Reyner Banham, The Independent Group and Pop Design; Richard Hamilton and the Tabular Image; Roy Lichtenstein and the Screened Image; Andy Warhol and the Seamy Image; Gerhard Richter and the Photogenic Image; Ed Ruscha and the Cineramic Image; Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and the Postmodern Absorption of Pop.

Works (each image accompanied by an extended caption): Section 1: Revolt into Style (1956-60) surveys the birth of Pop culture and its images, including the Beat generation photographs of Robert Frank and William Klein; Kenneth Anger's early films; futuristic architecture by Disneyland's 'imagineers'; artworks by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, the French Nouveaux realistes, Richard Hamilton and the 'British Pop' of the Independent Group. Section 2: Consumer Culture (1960-63) follows American Pop's explosion, from Roy Lichtenstein's cartoon-based paintings to Andy Warhol's Factory, the hamburger, cake and ice cream sculptures of Claes Oldenburg, and Robert Indiana's Eat/Die.

Section 3: Colonization of the Mind (1963-66) chronicles the era of 'high' Pop when it became a dominant international style in art, design, architecture and cinema.

Section 4: Spectacular Time (1966-67) looks at the more self-reflexive work in art, film and architecture that coincided with the publication of Marshall McLuhan's The Medium is the Message and Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle.

Section 5: Helter Skelter (1968) traces Pop's meltdown in the late 1960s: the emergence of the vernacular in architecture, with Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown's Learning from Las Vegas; the spiralling mayhem of films such as Donald Cammell and Nicholas Roeg's Performance, starring Mick Jagger, and the final destructive crescendo of Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point, as an exploding house and its contents are synched to a soundtrack by Pink Floyd.

Documents. A compendium of original artists' statements and interviews, often from hard-to-find, out of print sources; key writings by critics such as Reyner Banham, Donald Judd and Jonas Mekas; extracts from key contextual writings, from Jack Kerouac to articles on Pop culture.