The conventional history of modern art was written on the busy Paris-New York axis, as if nowhere else existed. For a while, nowhere else did. People wondered, for example, whyever the mercurial Whistler volunteered for the unventilated backwaters of Britain. But London was eventually allowed into the international conversation following successful pop eruptions that began in the Fifties. Germany followed.
Now, perhaps as a response to a wired and borderless planet, where images can be instantaneously transmitted and sacred cows may be frivolously slaughtered, there is a revisionist and more inclusive policy for entrance to art’s pantheon. The braided cord has been lifted. Everyone can join the club.
New York’s Museum of Modern Art is showing an exhibition called Transmissions, which illuminates neglected art from Eastern Europe and Latin America. And the event of the season at London’s Tate Modern is The World Goes Pop, an account of pop art beyond SoHo lofts and Chelsea studios. An account, indeed, that even takes in Cluj-Napoca, Bogota and Wroclaw. To the established names Paolozzi, Warhol, Hamilton and Lichtenstein we must now add Corneliu Brudascu, Joan Rabascall and Bernard Rancillac.
The authorised version is that pop art was, circa 1956, the simultaneous creation of austerity-blighted London artists yearning for the glamour of America and New York artists responding ironically to a domestic culture of obsessive consumerism, wonderful sign-writing, overbearing advertising and occult sexualisation of everything from tinned beans to vacuum cleaners.
With visual puns very much intended, they used media techniques — screen printing, lithography, photomontage, irreverent sampling, flat colours, strident messages — to satirise and lionise the American Dream in their mass-produced art. What we can now see at Tate Modern is that these very same techniques and a similar interest in synoptic images were also at work for revolutionary movements in Colombia and anti-nuclear protestors in street-fighting Paris
There was, necessarily, a popular appeal in pop art and the new Tate show will replicate that, replication being the very essence of pop.
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