Pop Art

Princeton University Art Museum Monographs is a new series of in-depth explorations of the museum's rich collections. Beautifully designed and produced, these books by leading and emerging scholars offer new insights and perspectives on a single work or group of works from Princeton's distinguished permanent collection. Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Tom Wesselmann, Robert Indiana, and Alex Katz have all come to define the revelatory and controversial Pop art movement that emerged in America in the 1960s. This handsomely illustrated book focuses on 40 understudied and rarely-seen late paintings, works on paper, and sculptures by these influential artists in the collection of the Princeton University Art Museum. "Pop Art" offers fresh insights on the ways in which artists radically transformed the mediums of painting and sculpture, and pointed revisions of the movement's relationship to art history. For example, Lichtenstein is positioned as a classical 'studio artist'; Wesselmann is shown to be playfully preoccupied with academic genres; and Indiana is interpreted less as a Pop artist than as a folk artist in a mass-cultural context. This important book also features an engaging introduction by Hal Foster that places these new interpretations in the context of the history of Pop art and its critical literature.