Synopses & Reviews
"
The First Pop Age is a remarkable book: it offers a series of trenchant models for understanding how five key Pop artists remade the modern picture and, in doing so, took on some of the most crucial issues of our time--mass media, consumer culture, trauma, and selfhood--as well as the possibilities of painting itself."
--Leah Dickerman, Museum of Modern Art"Pursuing brilliant close readings of art with a light theoretical touch, Foster shows how five artists at once relished and questioned the fundamental changes in ourselves and our images that defined the 1950s and 1960s. No one has thought Pop better."--Harry Cooper, National Gallery of Art
"Foster probes Pop's core obsessions: sex and death, celebrity and anonymity, fetishism and indifference, the machine and the body. Exploring the subjective dynamics of a supposedly antisubjective art, and the political implications of a putatively apolitical art, The First Pop Age offers a fresh account of 'distressed' masculinity in Cold War culture."--Mignon Nixon, Courtauld Institute of Art
"This is a deeply insightful, elegantly written, original, and important book that pushes beyond accepted pieties about Pop art and provides a refreshing new take on it. Seen through Hal Foster's lens, the paintings and writings of Hamilton, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Richter, and Ruscha constitute remarkably astute engagements with pop culture at the very moment of its full emergence."--Michael Leja, University of Pennsylvania
"With visual and analytical acuity, Hal Foster offers a view of Pop art that is both genuinely new and generously open to further development. Engagingly written, with a keen sense of the shifting stakes of Pop across different contexts and careers, Foster's book is sure to become a standard reference for specialists and general readers alike."--Graham Bader, Rice University
Review
"Foster digs deep into the work of five pop painters: Richard Hamilton, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter and Ed Ruscha, paying particular attention to the formal qualities and often complex processes they used to create their paintings. This marks a shift from traditional readings of pop, which privilege subject matter over form. . . . Revolutionary. . . . Foster expertly leads us through the intricacies of one of art history's most popular movements."--Anny Shaw, Art Newspaper
Review
"[Foster] brilliantly weaves a history of five Pop artists, including Andy Warhol, to detail his proposition that Pop Art, as much as it came as a reaction to the pressures of modernity, was centrally concerned with the role of the image in contemporary culture."--Joel Kuennen, ArtSlant
Review
"The First Pop Age presents a fresh and highly engaging take on one of the most worked-over movements in the history of art. . . . Any book by Foster, Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, is something of an event in art history circles and The First Pop Age is no exception. It is lavishly illustrated throughout."--Cassone Magazine
Review
"Foster is an erudite analyst of the five artists he has chosen--Richard Hamilton, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and Ed Ruscha--and an illuminating guide to their paintings and sculpture. . . . For readers interested in placing Pop art in the contexts of postmodernist and postructuralist theories of subjectivity, Foster's book will be an important reference work. But for a general reader more interested in the history and evolution of Pop, The First Pop Age is most provocative for the ideas half-hidden or unstated in the text about Pop's rise and fall, ideas suggested by Foster's juxtapositions of artists and works and his increasing emphasis on the traumatic, distressed, and apocalyptic strains in Pop imagery."--Elaine Showalter, Literary Review
Review
"Foster has given us a solid and thought-provoking map of the First Pop Age, to which we might now look back with a strong sense of nostalgia." --John-Paul Stonard, The Times Literary Supplement
Review
"Seabright, an economist familiar with evolutionary modelling, synthesises several disciplines in asking what our evolutionary heritage teaches us about men's and women's rights and roles in the modern labour market. Judicious in bringing Darwinism to bear on contemporary mores, he avoids the vulgar reductionism that often plagues this kind of popular science." --Camilla Powers, The Times Higher Education Supplement
Review
"Drawing on historical and theoretical contexts, this volume explores how these artists (Richard Hamilton, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Gerhard Richter, and Ed Ruscha) exploited new subjects and media in the context of traditional art forms. Richly illustrated with numerous color reproductions, the book also reveals how the work of these key figures evidenced an ambiguous attitude toward mass culture and high art."--Choice
Review
"Foster's book offers the most sustained demonstration to date of the once contested belief that, far from merely reproducing their source materials, Pop paintings reinvent them. . . . Foster shines here. . . . His great pages on $he (1958-61 . . .) are unmatched in their grasp of tabular painting."--Anne Wagner, London Review of Books
Review
Foster digs deep into the work of five pop painters: Richard Hamilton, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter and Ed Ruscha, paying particular attention to the formal qualities and often complex processes they used to create their paintings. This marks a shift from traditional readings of pop, which privilege subject matter over form. . . . Revolutionary. . . . Foster expertly leads us through the intricacies of one of art history's most popular movements. London Review of Books
Review
[Foster] brilliantly weaves a history of five Pop artists, including Andy Warhol, to detail his proposition that Pop Art, as much as it came as a reaction to the pressures of modernity, was centrally concerned with the role of the image in contemporary culture. Anny Shaw - Art Newspaper
Review
The First Pop Age presents a fresh and highly engaging take on one of the most worked-over movements in the history of art. . . . Any book by Foster, Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, is something of an event in art history circles and The First Pop Age is no exception. It is lavishly illustrated throughout. Joel Kuennen - ArtSlant
Review
Foster is an erudite analyst of the five artists he has chosen--Richard Hamilton, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and Ed Ruscha--and an illuminating guide to their paintings and sculpture. . . . For readers interested in placing Pop art in the contexts of postmodernist and postructuralist theories of subjectivity, Foster's book will be an important reference work. But for a general reader more interested in the history and evolution of Pop, The First Pop Age is most provocative for the ideas half-hidden or unstated in the text about Pop's rise and fall, ideas suggested by Foster's juxtapositions of artists and works and his increasing emphasis on the traumatic, distressed, and apocalyptic strains in Pop imagery. Cassone Magazine
Review
Drawing on historical and theoretical contexts, this volume explores how these artists (Richard Hamilton, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Gerhard Richter, and Ed Ruscha) exploited new subjects and media in the context of traditional art forms. Richly illustrated with numerous color reproductions, the book also reveals how the work of these key figures evidenced an ambiguous attitude toward mass culture and high art. Elaine Showalter - Literary Review
Review
"Copiously illustrated, the book is full of sharp insights into Pop social contexts as well as the art itself. And it reminds us why the style takes its name from 'popular.'"--Dan Bischoff, Newark Star-Ledger
Review
"In The First Pop
Review
"Anyone seeking a crisp argument for the importance of contemporary art history should welcome the introduction of Hal Foster's latest book, The First Pop Age. . . . [Foster's] set of claims, briskly laid out, offers a model for what art history might now aim to achieve. . . . [The First Pop Age] is the definitive book on Pop and subjectivity. It is a book we have needed for some time. It is only a bonus, then, that The First Pop Age is such a pleasure to read. Foster's voice is lively and bright; one has the feeling of listening to a series of captivating scholarly talks, ideas tumbling out as if effortlessly. The compact volume is simply designed but lushly illustrated, a perfect size for toting and dipping into, one essay at a time. . . . [A]n excellent book--a significant contribution to the huge literature on Warhol. . . . The First Pop Age is a virtuosic summation of thoughts Foster has been working on for years, and cumulatively it offers some of art history's most piercing characterizations of recent capitalist subjectivity. . . . It is no surprise that Foster has produced such a powerful account. He has been a major figure in modernist art history for thirty years--having demonstrated just how richly valuable art can be as a means for understanding twentieth-century experience. . . . [T]his book is indispensible. We will not soon find a better or more convincing statement of the ways in which popular culture has fashioned a new subject."--Joshua Shannon, Art Journal
Synopsis
This book provides an important new interpretation of Pop art by examining five artists who, more deeply than any others, capture the new conditions of painting and subjectivity in the Pop age. In this account, illustrated in color throughout, Hal Foster explores the work of the Americans Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Ed Ruscha, the Englishman Richard Hamilton, and the German Gerhard Richter, revealing how these artists reflect on the profound changes in image and personhood that occur with pop culture.
Foster shows the different ways that these artists probe the possibilities of painterly tradition and mass culture alike. We see how Pop art folds painting and photography together, combining the effects of immediacy and mediation; how Pop evokes traditional forms even as it foregrounds contemporary contents; how the art strikes an ambiguous attitude toward both high and low cultures, neither critical nor complicit; and finally, how this ambiguity suggests a heightened confusion between public and private, between images and people.
As The First Pop Age looks back at the early days of Pop art, it also raises many important questions about art in our own day, from the continued capacity of painting to reflect on our technological world to whether we have moved beyond the Pop age or still live in its image world.
Synopsis
A compelling take on Pop art from esteemed critic Hal Foster
Who branded painting in the Pop age more brazenly than Richard Hamilton, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and Ed Ruscha? And who probed the Pop revolution in image and identity more intensely than they? In The First Pop Age, leading critic and historian Hal Foster presents an exciting new interpretation of Pop art through the work of these Pop Five.
Beautifully illustrated in color throughout, the book reveals how these seminal artists hold on to old forms of art while drawing on new subjects of media; how they strike an ambiguous attitude toward both high art and mass culture; and how they suggest that a heightened confusion between images and people is definitive of Pop culture at large.
As The First Pop Age looks back to the early years of Pop art, it also raises important questions about the present: What has changed in the look of screened and scanned images today? Is our media environment qualitatively different from that described by Warhol and company? Have we moved beyond the Pop age, or do we live in its aftermath?
A masterful account of one of the most important periods of twentieth-century art, this is a book that also sheds new light on our complex relationship to images today.
Synopsis
Who branded painting in the Pop age more brazenly than Richard Hamilton, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and Ed Ruscha? And who probed the Pop revolution in image and identity more intensely than they? In
The First Pop Age, leading critic and historian Hal Foster presents an exciting new interpretation of Pop art through the work of these Pop Five.
Beautifully illustrated in color throughout, the book reveals how these seminal artists hold on to old forms of art while drawing on new subjects of media; how they strike an ambiguous attitude toward both high art and mass culture; and how they suggest that a heightened confusion between images and people is definitive of Pop culture at large.
As The First Pop Age looks back to the early years of Pop art, it also raises important questions about the present: What has changed in the look of screened and scanned images today? Is our media environment qualitatively different from that described by Warhol and company? Have we moved beyond the Pop age, or do we live in its aftermath?
A masterful account of one of the most important periods of twentieth-century art, this is a book that also sheds new light on our complex relationship to images today.
Synopsis
Who branded painting in the Pop age more brazenly than Richard Hamilton, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and Ed Ruscha? And who probed the Pop revolution in image and identity more intensely than they? In The First Pop Age, leading critic and historian Hal Foster presents an exciting new interpretation of Pop art through the work of these Pop Five.
Beautifully illustrated in color throughout, the book reveals how these seminal artists hold on to old forms of art while drawing on new subjects of media; how they strike an ambiguous attitude toward both high art and mass culture; and how they suggest that a heightened confusion between images and people is definitive of Pop culture at large.
As The First Pop Age looks back to the early years of Pop art, it also raises important questions about the present: What has changed in the look of screened and scanned images today? Is our media environment qualitatively different from that described by Warhol and company? Have we moved beyond the Pop age, or do we live in its aftermath?
A masterful account of one of the most important periods of twentieth-century art, this is a book that also sheds new light on our complex relationship to images today.
Synopsis
"The First Pop Age is a remarkable book: it offers a series of trenchant models for understanding how five key Pop artists remade the modern picture and, in doing so, took on some of the most crucial issues of our time--mass media, consumer culture, trauma, and selfhood--as well as the possibilities of painting itself."--Leah Dickerman, Museum of Modern Art
"Pursuing brilliant close readings of art with a light theoretical touch, Foster shows how five artists at once relished and questioned the fundamental changes in ourselves and our images that defined the 1950s and 1960s. No one has thought Pop better."--Harry Cooper, National Gallery of Art
"Foster probes Pop's core obsessions: sex and death, celebrity and anonymity, fetishism and indifference, the machine and the body. Exploring the subjective dynamics of a supposedly antisubjective art, and the political implications of a putatively apolitical art, The First Pop Age offers a fresh account of 'distressed' masculinity in Cold War culture."--Mignon Nixon, Courtauld Institute of Art
"This is a deeply insightful, elegantly written, original, and important book that pushes beyond accepted pieties about Pop art and provides a refreshing new take on it. Seen through Hal Foster's lens, the paintings and writings of Hamilton, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Richter, and Ruscha constitute remarkably astute engagements with pop culture at the very moment of its full emergence."--Michael Leja, University of Pennsylvania
"With visual and analytical acuity, Hal Foster offers a view of Pop art that is both genuinely new and generously open to further development. Engagingly written, with a keen sense of the shifting stakes of Pop across different contexts and careers, Foster's book is sure to become a standard reference for specialists and general readers alike."--Graham Bader, Rice University
Synopsis
Who branded painting in the Pop age more brazenly than Richard Hamilton, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and Ed Ruscha? And who probed the Pop revolution in image and identity more intensely than they? In
The First Pop Age, leading critic and historian Hal Foster presents an exciting new interpretation of Pop art through the work of these Pop Five.
Beautifully illustrated in color throughout, the book reveals how these seminal artists hold on to old forms of art while drawing on new subjects of media; how they strike an ambiguous attitude toward both high art and mass culture; and how they suggest that a heightened confusion between images and people is definitive of Pop culture at large.
As The First Pop Age looks back to the early years of Pop art, it also raises important questions about the present: What has changed in the look of screened and scanned images today? Is our media environment qualitatively different from that described by Warhol and company? Have we moved beyond the Pop age, or do we live in its aftermath?
A masterful account of one of the most important periods of twentieth-century art, this is a book that also sheds new light on our complex relationship to images today.
Synopsis
"
The First Pop Age is a remarkable book: it offers a series of trenchant models for understanding how five key Pop artists remade the modern picture and, in doing so, took on some of the most crucial issues of our time--mass media, consumer culture, trauma, and selfhood--as well as the possibilities of painting itself."--Leah Dickerman, Museum of Modern Art
"Pursuing brilliant close readings of art with a light theoretical touch, Foster shows how five artists at once relished and questioned the fundamental changes in ourselves and our images that defined the 1950s and 1960s. No one has thought Pop better."--Harry Cooper, National Gallery of Art
"Foster probes Pop's core obsessions: sex and death, celebrity and anonymity, fetishism and indifference, the machine and the body. Exploring the subjective dynamics of a supposedly antisubjective art, and the political implications of a putatively apolitical art, The First Pop Age offers a fresh account of 'distressed' masculinity in Cold War culture."--Mignon Nixon, Courtauld Institute of Art
"This is a deeply insightful, elegantly written, original, and important book that pushes beyond accepted pieties about Pop art and provides a refreshing new take on it. Seen through Hal Foster's lens, the paintings and writings of Hamilton, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Richter, and Ruscha constitute remarkably astute engagements with pop culture at the very moment of its full emergence."--Michael Leja, University of Pennsylvania
"With visual and analytical acuity, Hal Foster offers a view of Pop art that is both genuinely new and generously open to further development. Engagingly written, with a keen sense of the shifting stakes of Pop across different contexts and careers, Foster's book is sure to become a standard reference for specialists and general readers alike."--Graham Bader, Rice University
About the Author
Hal Foster is the Townsend Martin Class of 1917 Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, and the author of many books, including "The Return of the Real", "Design and Crime", "Prosthetic Gods", and "The Art-Architecture Complex". A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he was the 2010 recipient of the Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing and the 2013 recipient of the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism.
Table of Contents
Homo Imago 1
Chapter 1: Richard Hamilton, or the Tabular Image 17
Chapter 2: Roy Lichtenstein, or the Cliché Image 62
Chapter 3: Andy Warhol, or the Distressed Image 109
Chapter 4: Gerhard Richter, or the Photogenic Image 172
Chapter 5: Ed Ruscha, or the Deadpan Image 210
Pop Test 249
Notes 253
Photography and Copyright Credits 321
Subject Index 323
Title Index 335