Where’s the fun, Barbican? 

Pop Art Design, curated by the Vitra Design Museum and currently at the Barbican, opens with Richard Hamilton’s 1956 ‘Just what makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?’. Made as a poster for the Whitechapel show This is Tomorrow, it’s a witty collage of consumer fantasies scissored out of magazines, reminding us that interest in popular culture among British artists operated as a humorous, semi-anthropological collegiate research project. In part, British Pop was a riposte to the lushness of American consumerism from a small island that had won the war but had lost the peace. Pop Art in the United States got under way later and many American Pop artists had had first-hand experience of commercial art. Andy Warhol had been an illustrator, James Rosenquist a billboard artist, Edward Ruscha a typographer, while the sculptor Richard Artschwager had worked as a trade furniture-maker. Their work dominates the early part of Pop Art Design, together with some of their source material — a nicely battered Coca-Cola vending machine, for instance. The British work — sculpture by Eduardo Paolozzi, painting by Richard Hamilton and a magazine cover by John McHale — seems quirky and handmade beside the big glossy guns of American Pop. If we are familiar with the synergy between Pop Art and the iconography of everyday consumerism — advertising, cheap comics, B-movie film posters, Coca-Cola bottles and Campbell soup tins — what is less well understood are the ways in which designers were in turn inspired by Pop Art’s scrutiny of consumerism. Pop Art, at least in the United States, reacted against the sombre grandeur of Abstract Expressionism. ‘Pop Design’, on the other hand, was questioning the tasteful austerity of design modernism, exemplified by the sleek form-follows-function aesthetic of the German electronics manufacturer Braun. Here it all gets complicated and I am not sure that Pop Art Design offers much clarity.

We miss a sense of the free-floating, throwaway playfulness of the visual culture of the 1960s and 1970s

Though billed as the first exhibition to put Pop Art alongside related design, Pop Art Design is a surprisingly solemn exhibition that gives a lot of space to iconic pop art and sculpture and a selection of desirable design classics — quite a few of which are still in production under licence to Vitra’s manufacturing arm.