Editorial: Pop Art. Imitation, Translation, Transcreation.

This special issue relates to Art in Translation’s ongoing research interests in European-US American artistic relations. The four authors represented here—Julia Bailey, Silvia Bottinelli, Stefana Djokic, and Javier Ortiz-Echagüe – were part of a team of scholars involved in collaborating in the Art in Translation project on European writing on US art, funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art between 2015 and 2020. The main outcome to date is the two-volume anthology titled Hot Art, Cold War (eds. Claudia Hopkins, Iain Boyd Whyte, New York: Routledge, 2020). With the first volume focusing on Western and Northern European writing and the second on Southern and Eastern European writing, the anthology traces the pan-European reception of US art during the Cold War through some 250 primary sources, translated into English and augmented by scholarly essays, which delineate the context of the reception of American art in each nation. Without privileging any particular viewpoint, the anthology enables readers to compare how art writers – journalists, art historians, curators, artists, philosophers, politicians – from all across Europe presented American art to their national audiences. Reading translated texts from generally understudied regions – such as Portugal, Greece, or Russia and Finland – alongside familiar texts by well-known French and British critics is a revelatory experience, demonstrating the diversity of reactions to US art, as it arrived at different times and was viewed through different lenses, mediated by cultural prejudice, politics, aesthetics, commerce that were very specific to the local contexts.

The four papers in this special issue develop some of the insights gained from the anthology-project. Three of the papers – those by Bailey, Bottinelli, and Ortiz-Echagüe – derive from the presentations they delivered at the panel European Encounters with American Art 1960-1970 at the annual College of Art Association conference in Chicago in February 2020. With the addition of Djokic’s essay, the issue focuses on case studies drawn from examples in the Soviet Union, former Yugoslavia, Italy, and Spain, foregrounding the diverging ideological, aesthetic, and pragmatic issues that impacted on cultural approaches to US art in four radically different political landscapes.

The modes of these encounters with US art varied, from secretly reading Western art magazines at one extreme, to socialising with US artists in New York at the other. Russian artists based in the Soviet Union had to find ways of bypassing censorship in order to access English-language publications about contemporary US art. By contrast, in Tito’s Yugoslavia, Mussolini’s Italy, and Franco’s Spain, artists and critics were able to access US art through exhibitions taking place in their own countries and by travelling to other parts of Europe and to the US. The Yugoslav artist Olja Ivanjicki spent a year in the US (1962-1963) as a Ford Foundation scholarship recipient, while a Fulbright scholarship enabled the Italian critic Marisa Volpi Orlandini to spend an extended period of time in the US in 1966. For the Spanish artists Manolo Valdés and Rafael Solbés of the collective Equipo Crónica, Paris was a key location to see Pop art exhibitions.¹

This special issue also highlights the important role played by women in the European reception of US art. Ivanjicki declared herself “Pop” to Belgrade audiences in 1964, prompting a polemical debate amongst critics and Tito’s ideologues, who, as Djokic argues, viewed Pop art as an inappropriate artform for a Yugoslav artist to adopt. – shows how Volpi’s experience of New York and her personal acquaintance with many prominent artists there enabled her to publish the first Italian-language book about the art of the United States after 1945. Bottinelli’s discussion of Volpi is complemented by two chapters from her book, which have been translated here for the first time into English. The freedom with which Volpi and Ivanjicki were able to experience US Pop art contrasts with the suppressive environment of the Soviet Union in which the female artist Nadezhda Stolpovskaya came into contact with US art. Bypassing censorship, she took it upon herself to access and translate restricted Western publications during the late 1970s, and in this way contributed to the development of dissident Soviet art and Moscow Conceptualism.

The reactions to Pop art were far from uniform, as even within one country, the positions of artists, critics, and politicians could differ and shift fairly quickly, depending on the specificities of place and politics. As Bottinelli’s essay points out, Lucy Lippard’s publication Pop Art of 1966 was influential in opening up debates about Pop art and its impact. While Lippard acknowledged Pop art’s presence in places other than the US and Britain, she dismissed these practices as “unconvincing” or “imitative,” claiming that the style was a uniquely American and British phenomenon.² The conviction that it could only flourish in highly industrialized societies was further echoed in 1990 by the art historian Marco Livingstone in Pop Art: A Continuing History, in which he rejected the idea of Pop art’s existence in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.³ Even in 2003, Tilman Osterworld still described Pop art as an entirely Western cultural phenomenon in his book Pop Art.⁴ Since then such views have significantly broadened, for example the conference Pop Europe? held at Wolverhampton Art Gallery (UK) in 2014 addressed the geographical reach of the phenomenon in Britain, America, and Europe. It was followed a year later by The EY Exhibition: The World Goes Pop exhibition (Tate, September 2015-January 2016), which revealed Pop art as a global and often subversive phenomenon in various regions outside the US, from Latin America to Asia and from Europe to the Middle East. In the context of this issue, the case of the Moscow artists Komar and Melamid, discussed by Bailey, serves as a prime example for a creative engagement with the language of Pop on the eastern side of the Iron curtain, which led to the launch of the Sots Art movement in the early 1970s.

As shown by Bailey and Djokic, the concept of translation provides a useful metaphor for understanding the impact of US art on artistic practice because it aids in the demise of the conventional notion of “influence.” The latter is a vexed term because it undermines the originality of an artwork that has been created in direct response to another, allegedly superior artwork or movement. Drawing on translation theories, Djokic’s discussion mostly adopts Lawrence Venuti’s concepts of domestication and foreignization for her analysis of Yugoslav artistic approaches, while Bailey draws on André Lefevere’s idea of translation as a form of rewriting that is affected by the translator’s own ideology and the dominant poetics, which necessarily becomes an act of “manipulation, undertaken in the service of power.”⁵ Djokic also evokes the Brazilian poet Haroldo de Campo’s use of the image of the cannibal as a cultural metaphor for translation, an idea he developed in the 1950s.⁶ De Campo’s thinking of translation as a cannibalistic act is helpful for explaining the creative process by which Ivanjicki digests the language of US art in order to forge her own style and imagery, which express ideas that are specific to Yugoslav reality and her personal life. Going a step further than Ivanjicki, the Russian artists Komar and Melamid did not wish to emulate US art but to agitate and interrogate it when they appropriated reproductions of Warhol’s famous soup for their first Post-Art painting. Hence, describing such works as merely derivative or imitative of something else is inappropriate because it fails to recognize the artist’s strategies and the meanings of their works. Here, as Bailey argues, Haroldo de Campos’s repositioning of translation as a “transcreation” is particularly relevant, as it challenges the common preferencing of the “original” source over its supposedly inferior “translation.”⁷

The artists and critics discussed in this issue also raise relevant questions over the definition and the use of the label “Pop art.” In the 1960s, the boundaries and affiliations to groups and labels were loose and terms such New Dada, Nouveau Realisme, Scuola di Piazza del Popolo, Poesie Visiva, New Figuration, and Pop existed simultaneously to refer to a new engagement with figuration, mass media, and consumerism in art. At the time the artists’ attitudes to artistic labels differed too. If Ivanjicki dramatically declared herself as a “Pop artist” to the Belgrade art world in 1964, the artists of the Spanish collective Equipo Crónica never subscribed to the label “Pop,” nor to any other label. As Manolo Valdés stated retrospectively “The world places you in this category and you accept it, but we didn’t work under the premises of this label.”⁸

The question of ideological uses and the political effectiveness of art during the Cold War is a running theme throughout the four essays. It is particularly well explored in Javier Ortiz-Echagüe’s discussion of the appropriations of Picasso’s Guernica (1937) at the hands of US and European curators, politicians, and artists in the 1960s. From a discussion of the battle over the meanings of Guernica at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the attempts made at depoliticizing the work in the 1960s, Ortiz-Echagüe moves our attention to the entangled artistic and political responses to both Guernica and the visual language of Pop in Spain. Francoist authorities made efforts to neutralise Guernica’s potential as an anti-Franco, anti-war protest image and campaigned for its transfer from MoMA to Spain. In response to their unsuccessful mission, Equipo Crónica cleverly approached Guernica and its celebrity status ironically in their Guernica 69 series, arguably reinstating Guernica’s original political power.

Claudia Hopkins (Durham University, Associate Editor of Art in Translation) and Stefana Djokic, University of Edinburgh

Notes

1 “Artist’s Interview: Manolo Valdés,” Tate, London, September 2015. https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/world-goes-pop/artist-interview/manolo-valdes, accessed April 2022.

2 Lucy Lippard, “New York Pop,” in Lucy Lippard (ed.), Pop Art (London: Thames and Hudson Limited, 1970), 69.

3 Marco Livingstone, Pop Art: A Continuing History (London: Thames Hudson, 1990), 141

4 Tilman Osterwold, Pop Art (Cologne: Taschen, 2003), 6.

5 Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere, Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), vii.

6 Odile Cisneros, “From Isomorphism to Cannibalism: The Evolution of Haroldo de Campos’s Translation Concepts,” TTR, Vol. 25.2 (2012): 15-44.

7 Haroldo de Campos, “Translation as Creation and Criticism,” in Metainguagem e Outras Metas: Ensaios de Teoria e Crítica Literária (Sao Paulo: Perspectiva, 1992).

8 “Artist’s Interview: Manolo Valdés,” Tate, London, September 2015. https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/world-goes-pop/artist-interview/manolo-valdes, accessed April 2022.