Pop

Pop art is bold and brash. The subjects are familiar, the forms flat. The lines are crisp and the images clear. But in spite of its apparent simplicity, pop art transforms images lifted directly from advertising, news reports, and highway signs into sly commentaries on consumerism, our fascination with glamour, and the superficiality of contemporary American mass culture. Pop art emerged in stark contrast to the emotional intensity of abstract expressionism, then the reigning movement in contemporary art. Pop art’s banal subject matter and commercial references startled viewers. Pizza? A comic book frame? A movie star? Pin-up girls? Art lovers had always assumed that high art and popular culture were oppositional concepts—until Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and others of their generation challenged prevailing assumptions about what fine art should be. This exhibition features 37 works drawn from the Smithsonian American Art Museum collection augmented with a suite of “Marilyn” prints by Warhol from the Vancouver Art Gallery collection.