Part III: Transformation/Transmedia/Transfusion

Expressionism is provided by Clement Greenberg’s “After Abstract Expresionism” (1962), The Collected Essays and Criticism,Expresionism” (1962), The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969, (ed. John O’Brian), Chicago/London 1993 (1986), pp. 126–127, where Greenberg describes a trend in American and European nonfigurative art that he 314 Modernism as Institution calls homeless representations, lingering figurative and illusory elements, that is, with Jasper John’s art being described as the swansong of this trend: as a beautiful but doomed finale. The term pre-pop was introduced in a different context in which Pop Art was celebrated and classified as a new contemporary idiom, with Rauschenberg and Johns being considered its forerunners because, while they had obvious links with Pop Art, they could not be included within it. Segregating classifications and distinctions of this kind were already being made in American art criticism in 1962–1963, when Pop Art was rapidly becoming a phenomenon that was impossible to ignore; the term pre-pop, however, was more usually employed with the aim of establishing a diachronic context. Initially, this was in the exhibitions and survey works that dealt with Pop Art as a historical phenomenon. One example is Lucy Lippard, who uses the term to distinguish Pop Art from previous attempts to reproduce popular cultural references in art (see Lippard, p. 75); another would be its use in order both to establish a historical connection with an older form of modernism and to isolate Pop Art as a distinct new stylistic and historical category (e.g., Livingstone, 1990, pp. 9–11), in which artists such as Johns, Rauschenberg and Larry Rivers are accorded a kind of transitional position between the traditional and the new. 41. The term Pop Art is usually said to have been introduced by Lawrence Alloway, either in 1954 (without a source being indicated) or in 1958 in the article “The Arts and the Mass Media” (Architectural Design & Construction, February 1958, pp. 84–85.), but it was not, in fact, used here. The term was, however, evidently current in the circles of the Independent Group in London at the end of the 1950s and can be found, for example, in a subsequently frequently published letter from Richard Hamilton to Peter and Alison Smithson of 1957 (see Madoff, pp. 5–6). The term took on a renewed, if slightly altered, topicality in the New York art world at the end of 1962, when a new international phenomenon was celebrated in the exhibition New Realists at the Sidney Janis Gallery, New York (1/11–1/12 1962), which showed work by artists from England, France, Italy, the United States and Sweden, who were grouped together by John Ashbury in his foreword on the basis of their shared interest in everyday objects. The term Pop Art had not yet become Endnotes for Part III 315 established, and the initial conceptual confusion felt by the New York art world is clearly evident in the article by Barbara Rose “The New Realists, Neo-Dada, Le nouveau réalisme, Pop Art, The New Vulgarians, Common Object Painting, Know-nothing genre” (Art International, vol. VII, January 1963: 1, pp. 22–28). In December 1962 “A Symposium on Pop Art” concerning the rapid emergence of this phenomenon was held at MoMA, while the first survey exhibitions of Pop Art were held in museums shortly afterwards: Walter Hopp’s The New Painting of Common Objects, Pasadena Museum of Art (25/9–19/1