Pop Art and Anglo-American Art Criticism: Against Bourgeois Propaganda in the Sphere of Art

Abstract

Based on her reading of the survey of Pop Art, edited by Lucy Lippard (1966) and the Time-Life book American Painting 1900 − 1970 (1971), the Soviet art historian Tatyana Yureva analyzes US Pop art, seeing in it a perfectly comprehensible movement of 1960s postmodernism, emerging from the local political culture with its own precise rules and well-defined creative aspirations. Although firmly grounded on a Marxist analysis, her account served to introduce US Pop art to the Soviet Russian public and confirmed the broadening interests of the Russian readers on the eve of perestroika.

Keywords:

• US art
• Pop art
• anti-art
• consumerism
• cultural revolution
• counterculture
• Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
• Communist Party of the United State of America
• Herbert Marcuse
• Norman Mailer
• James Baldwin
• Edward Albee
• Robert Merton
• Raymond Aron Lawrence Alloway
• Lawrence Alloway
• Marilyn Monroe
• Tom Wesselmann
• Roy Lichtenstein
• Andy Warhol
• James Rosenquist
• Claes Oldenburg
• Jim Dine

Notes

1 V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1959), vol. 12, 105.

2 Estetika. Iskusstvo. Chelovek [Aesthetics. Art. Man] (Moscow, 1977), 247.

E

3 Lucy R. Lippard (ed.), Pop Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1966).

4 Ibid., 9.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid., 11.

7 Ibid., 170.

8 Lawrence Alloway, “Popular Culture and Pop art,” Studio International, no. 213 (1969): 18.

9 Simon Wilson, Pop (London, Thames & Hudson, 1974).

10 Ibid., 4.

11 See Ibid.

12 Ibid., 10.

13 Ibid., 8.

14 V. I. Lenin, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii (Moscow, 1959), vol. 1, 423.

15 Jerry Korn (ed.), American Painting 1900-1970 (New York, Time), 169.

16 Ibid., 176.

17 Gene R. Swenson, “What is Pop Art? Interviews with Eight Painters (Part 1),” Art News (November 1963): 24.

18 Ibid., 25.

19 Gene R. Swenson, “What is Pop Art? (Part 2),” Art News, no. 2 (February 1964): 61.

20 See V. A. Kryuchkova, Sotsiologiya iskusstva i modernizm [The Sociology of Art and Modernism] (Moscow, 1979), 117.

21 Swenson, “What is Pop art? (Part 2),” 66.

22 Swenson, ‘What is Pop art? (Part 1),” 26.

23 Combat (26 June 1964).

24 Phyllis Tuchman, “Pop art,” Art News (May 1974): 24.

25 Swenson, “What is Pop art? (Part 2),” 63.

26 Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel, The Popular Arts (London: Hutchinson Educational, 1964), 317.

27 Ihab Hassan, The Dismemberment of Orpheus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 200.

28 D. M. Urnov, Literaturnoe proizvedenie v otsenke anglo-amerikanskoi ‘novoi kritiki’ [Literary Work in an Estimation of Anglo-American ‘New Criticism’] (Moscow, 1982), 58.

29 Mario Amaya, Pop Art and After (New York: Viking, 1966).

30 See Amerikanskaya khudozhestvennaya kul’tura v sotsial’no-politicheskom kontekste 70-kh godov XX veka [American Artistic Culture in the Social and Political Context of the 1970s of the Twentieth Century] (Moscow, 1982), 211.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tatyana Yureva

Translated by Christina Lodder Originally published as “Поп-арт и англо-американская художественная критика,” in Искусство no 6 (1985): 43–46.