Pop Art Prints from the Collection

The spirited revival of printmaking in the 1960s was closely tied to the emergence of Pop Art. The Philadelphia Museum of Art has assembled some 50 prints by 13 American artists, including Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg and James Rosenquist, to document this important and provocative era in printmaking. Pop Art Prints, drawn from the permanent collections, was organized by Starr Figura, Curatorial Intern in the Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, under the supervision of Innis H. Shoemaker, Senior Curator of the department. American Pop artists were attracted to the commercial printmaking techniques of silkscreen and lithography, and used them to incorporate images from television, film, advertising, and other forms of popular art and culture into their work. Many artists also experimented with new materials and techniques, such as printing on plastic, adding collage elements, or incorporating photomechanical processes. Pop artists often worked at the professional print workshops that developed at that time, most notably Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) in West Islip, N.Y. The exhibition includes the first print created at ULAE, a collaborative effort by Larry Rivers and Frank O'Hara for the portfolio Stones (1957-59). Also on view is Andy Warhol's only intaglio print, Cooking Pot (1962), a photoengraving created for The International Avant-Garde: America Discovered. This portfolio was published in Milan in 1964 by art dealer Arturo Schwarz, who early recognized thematic similarities in a group of young Americans who dealt with consumer culture in their work. Other seminal images can be found in 1¢ Life, a portfolio of illustrated poetry by the Chinese poet and painter Walasse Ting (published in Bern, Switzerland in 1964) that contains many of the first Pop images to be produced as color prints, such as Warhol's Marilyn Monroe I Love Your Kiss Forever Forever.