|
|
|
|
 | The First Pop Age: |
ADDITIONAL REVIEWS: "Foster is an erudite analyst of the five artists he has chosen--Richard Hamilton, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and Ed Ruscha--and an illuminating guide to their paintings and sculpture. . . . For readers interested in placing Pop art in the contexts of postmodernist and postructuralist theories of subjectivity, Foster's book will be an important reference work. But for a general reader more interested in the history and evolution of Pop, The First Pop Age is most provocative for the ideas half-hidden or unstated in the text about Pop's rise and fall, ideas suggested by Foster's juxtapositions of artists and works and his increasing emphasis on the traumatic, distressed, and apocalyptic strains in Pop imagery."--Elaine Showalter, Literary Review "Drawing on historical and theoretical contexts, this volume explores how these artists (Richard Hamilton, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Gerhard Richter, and Ed Ruscha) exploited new subjects and media in the context of traditional art forms. Richly illustrated with numerous color reproductions, the book also reveals how the work of these key figures evidenced an ambiguous attitude toward mass culture and high art."--Choice "Copiously illustrated, the book is full of sharp insights into Pop social contexts as well as the art itself. And it reminds us why the style takes its name from 'popular.'"--Dan Bischoff, Newark Star-Ledger ADDITIONAL ENDORSEMENTS: "The First Pop Age is a remarkable book: it offers a series of trenchant models for understanding how five key Pop artists remade the modern picture and, in doing so, took on some of the most crucial issues of our time--mass media, consumer culture, trauma, and selfhood--as well as the possibilities of painting itself."--Leah Dickerman, Museum of Modern Art "Pursuing brilliant close readings of art with a light theoretical touch, Foster shows how five artists at once relished and questioned the fundamental changes in ourselves and our images that defined the 1950s and 1960s. No one has thought Pop better."--Harry Cooper, National Gallery of Art "Foster probes Pop's core obsessions: sex and death, celebrity and anonymity, fetishism and indifference, the machine and the body. Exploring the subjective dynamics of a supposedly antisubjective art, and the political implications of a putatively apolitical art, The First Pop Age offers a fresh account of 'distressed' masculinity in Cold War culture."--Mignon Nixon, Courtauld Institute of Art "This is a deeply insightful, elegantly written, original, and important book that pushes beyond accepted pieties about Pop art and provides a refreshing new take on it. Seen through Hal Foster's lens, the paintings and writings of Hamilton, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Richter, and Ruscha constitute remarkably astute engagements with pop culture at the very moment of its full emergence."--Michael Leja, University of Pennsylvania "With visual and analytical acuity, Hal Foster offers a view of Pop art that is both genuinely new and generously open to further development. Engagingly written, with a keen sense of the shifting stakes of Pop across different contexts and careers, Foster's book is sure to become a standard reference for specialists and general readers alike."--Graham Bader, Rice University File created: 5/16/2013 | |
Questions and comments to: webmaster@press.princeton.edu | |
