The Pop Revolution: How an Unlikely Concatenation of Artists, Aficionados, Businessmen, Critics, Curators, Collectors, Dealers, and Hangers-On Radically Transformed the Art World

Alice G. Marquis 

Hardcover | 15.75 x 2.29 x 23.37 cm | 232 pp | 16 colour illustrations

Museum of Fine Arts Boston | 2010 | 9780878467440

This book is a social history of Pop art, a group portrait of both the artists and the people who made some of them rich and famous in just a few years, while setting in motion the drastically altered way art has been marketed and appreciated – in the monetary and aesthetic sense – up to the present day. So begins Alice Goldfarb Marquis’ lively, informative and entertaining account of one of the twentieth century’s most flamboyant and influential art movements.

Included in this group portrait are the famous: Roy Lichtenstein and his “Blam-Pow” comics panels, Andy Warhol, shy, shrewd and tough as nails, the power couple of Leo Castelli and Ileana Sonnabend; the infamous, such as the collector Robert Scull, who bought so heavily that his own dealer deemed him “vulgar”; and a variegated cast ranging from artists Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Indiana and James Rosenquist to pioneering dealer Ivan Karp, controversial curator Henry Geldzahler, media guru Marshall McLuhan, author Tom Wolfe and many, many others. While shelves of books have been written about Pop art, The Pop Revolution is the first to approach it not only as an aesthetic upheaval, but also as a bellwether for the social, cultural, economic and political changes affecting America and Europe in the late twentieth century. As Marquis notes, the figures involved in creating and promoting the movement “set off the ‘culture boom’ of the 1960s, and were indispensable to the success, not only of Pop art, but of all the varied approaches to art that followed.”