CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/11/2015

Walker Art Center’s ‘International Pop’ Reviewed in the New York Times

Randy Kennedy writes, “For art lovers, and certainly for the collectors now paying tens of millions of dollars per painting at auction, Pop art and its trademark images — Marilyns, Ben-Day dots, Coca-Cola bottles, lipsticked lips — have become 20th century classicism, as canonical as Cubism and as appealing as candy."

Roy Lichtenstein, "Look Mickey" (1961).

"But for many artists working outside the United States during Pop’s birth in the early 1960s, the movement presented itself with all the charm of a steamroller. ‘In those years,' said Thomas Bayrle, a German painter who was making Mao’s portrait years before Andy Warhol did, 'it was like a football match in which one side was always winning and the other side couldn’t even score a single goal.’"

Evelyne Axell, "Ice Cream" (1964)

"Art history moved with unprecedented speed in defining Pop — the great curator Henry Geldzahler said it towed 'instant art history' in its wake — and the narrative that unfolded in museums and books has been predominantly American, with a pioneering British adjunct. But a half-century into the movement’s existence, its map is being redrawn with a vengeance."

Antonio Henrique Amaral, "Homenagem Sec. XX/XXI (20th/21st-Century Tribute)" (1967).

"An exhibition opening at the Walker Art Center on Saturday, International Pop one of the museum’s most ambitious historical shows in years, makes the case not only that Pop was sprouting in countless homegrown versions around the world but also that the term itself has become too narrow to encompass the revolution in thinking it represented for a generation of artists.”

Andy Warhol, "Sixteen Jackies" (1964).

To read the full review, continue to The New York Times.