Pop Art (Art of Century Collection)

This book offers a radically new perspective on the so-called ‘Pop Art’ creative dynamic that has been around since the 1950s.

It does so by enhancing the term ‘Pop Art’ which has always been recognised as a misnomer, for it obscures far more than it clarifies. Instead, the book connects all the art in question to mass-culture which has always provided its core inspiration. Above all, the book suggests that this Mass-Culture Art has created a new Modernist tradition which is still flourishing. The book traces that tradition through the forty or more years since Pop/Mass-Culture Art first came into being in the 1950s, and locates it within its larger historical context.

Naturally the book discusses the major contributors to the Pop/Mass-Culture Art tradition right up to the present, in the process including a number of artists who have never previously been connected with so-called ‘Pop Art’ but who have always been primarily interested in mass-culture, and who are therefore partially or totally connected with Pop/Mass-Culture Art. The book reproduces in colour and discusses in great detail over 150 of the key works of the Pop/Mass-Culture Art tradition. Often this involves the close reading of images whose meaning has largely escaped understanding previously. The result is a book that qualitatively is fully on a level with Eric Shanes’s other best-selling and award-winning writings.

About the author

Eric Shanes is primarily a painter who has exhibited many times in London and elsewhere. He is one of the world’s leading authorities on Britain’s greatest visual artist, J.M.W. Turner, and the author of ten bestselling books and catalogues on the life and work of that major European figure. Additionally, Shanes has also written bestselling books and catalogues on Brancusi, Warhol, Hockney, The Golden Age of British Watercolours, and on the Impressionists in London. Parkstone International has published two books by Eric Shanes, one on J.M.W. Turner, the other on Andy Warhol. Shanes is a Vice-President of the Turner Society and its current Chairman, as well as the Founding Editor of Turner Studies, a scholarly journal published by the Tate Gallery. He has also frequently contributed articles on Turner, Brancusi and other artists to specialist and popular journals and newspapers. In 2000-2001 he curated the major exhibition entitled ‘Turner: The Great Watercolours’ that was held at the Royal Academy of Arts in London to mark the 150th anniversary of Turner’s death. Shanes lectures on traditional, modern and contemporary art all over the world