We hope you enjoyed our most recent Book Fact Friday, because this week we’re giving away a copy of The First Pop Age!

The First Pop Age: Painting and Subjectivity in the Art of Hamilton, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Richter, and Ruscha
by 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?

FACT: “The word ‘tabular’ derives from tabula, Latin for ‘table’ but also for ‘writing tablet,’ in which, in ancient use, painting as well as printing figured as a mode of inscription. Richard Hamilton deploys both techniques in his practice (where printmaking is not necessarily secondary to painting); he does so in part because he finds the effects associated with them already imbricated in the media. ‘Tabular,’ then, also invokes writing, which Hamilton involves through his generative lists and programmatic titles. It connotes ‘tabloid’ as well, a form that Hamilton takes up directly in Swingeing London 67 (1968-69), a series of posters and paintings based on press coverage of Mick Jagger and Robert Fraser arrested for drug possession.”

The First Pop Age: Painting and Subjectivity in the Art of Hamilton, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Richter, and Ruscha
by 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.

You know his work: the cover for The Beatles’ ” White Album,” “Swingeing London,” depicting the arrest of Mick Jagger and Robert Fraser (also the cover of Hal Foster’s forthcoming The First Pop Age) and most famously, “Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?” The latter piece is often identified as the first example of Pop Art, well before Warhol came on the scene. The New York Times reported that the artist died yesterday at the age of 89.