Princeton University Art Museum Presents ‘Pop Art At Princeton’

Princeton, N.J.

:The Princeton University Art Museum is presenting the exhibition "Pop Art at Princeton: Permanent and Promised," a celebration of the museum's comprehensive collection –– acquired over the last 30 years through purchases, bequests and gifts, past and promised –– of paintings, prints, drawings and sculpture by leading figures of the American Pop Art movement.

The exhibition, which is on view through August 12, also includes examples of seldom seen later works by Robert Indiana, Alex Katz, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Andy Warhol and Tom Wessselmann, providing a broad historical overview of Pop Art as it has been practiced from the movement's origins to the present day.

The exhibition was organized to coincide with the publication this month of Pop Art: Contemporary Perspectives, the first in a new series of Princeton University Art Museum Monographs that will offer in-depth explorations of the Princeton University Art Museum's rich collections.

"Over the last 30 years, the Princeton University Art Museum has steadily augmented, by gift and purchase, its collection of Pop material," noted museum director Susan M. Taylor.

"These generous promised gifts highlight the significance of Pop Art and mark an important addition to the museum's collections in contemporary art. The pairing of the exhibition and the new museum publication series represents a singular opportunity for the museum to fulfill two fundamental, interrelated aspects of our mission: building the collection and advancing scholarship."

Taylor added that Princeton has a long tradition of interest in Modern and contemporary art. "Since the early Twentieth Century, the university's alumni and faculty have included important historians of Modern art who also have been influential critics of contemporary practice — Alfred Barr, Sam Hunter, William Seitz, Michael Fried, Rosalind Krauss, Thomas Crow and Hal Foster, among others."

Installed in two special exhibition galleries, the exhibition is organized around the works of individual artists.

The first gallery features the prints and sculpture of Indiana, a witty wall piece by Allan D'Arcangelo and cutout portraits by Katz, all pointing toward historical traditions in American art that have been imaginatively reinterpreted by these Pop artists. The works in this gallery also introduce some of the subjects, cultural issues and revolutionary techniques of the Pop era, through major prints by Jasper Johns, Jim Dine and Robert Rauschenberg, as well as Dine's five-paneled construction "The Art of Painting," 1972.

The second gallery concentrates on promised gifts of work by Wesselmann, Oldenburg and Van Bruggen, Warhol and Lichtenstein, and selected works from the museum's permanent collection by James Rosenquist, George Segal and Edward Ruscha. The exhibition compares several artists' early and later treatments of a single subject, pairing Wesselmann's molded plastic "Still Life #54" of 1965, for example, with his laser-cut steel "Still Life with Orange and Tulip" of 1986–92.

The group of promised gifts is particularly strong in the rarely discussed late sculpture of these artists, and the exhibition provides a number of opportunities to examine drawings and maquettes along with the finished pieces.

"Pop Art at Princeton" also features representations of the iconic motifs that became signature images for these artists in the Pop era –– Johns's targets, Dine's bathrobes and paintbrushes, Warhol's soup can and portrait of Marilyn –– while the darker side of American culture is presented in Rauschenberg's layered illustrations appropriated from the news media, and Warhol's screen printed images of social disaster.

Published by the Princeton University Art Museum and distributed by Yale University Press, Pop Art: New Perspectives features essays by recent PhD recipients or current doctoral candidates in the department of art and archaeology at Princeton University: Johanna Burton, Suzanne Hudson, Kevin Hatch, Alex Kitnick, Julia E. Robinson and Diana K. Tuite.

The authors focus on understudied and rarely seen late paintings, works on paper and sculptures by Indiana, Lichtenstein, Katz, Oldenburg, Warhol and Wesslemann, offering fresh critical reviews of the ways in which these artists radically transformed the mediums of painting and sculpture as well as pointed revisions of the movement's relationship to art history.

The book also includes an introduction by Hal Foster, the Townsend Martin '17 professor and chairman of the department of art and archaeology, and a preface by John Wilmerding, the Christopher B. Sarofim '86 professor of American art at Princeton, who retires this year.

The museum is offering a series of lectures, performances, film series, student events and family programs for the spring. Most of the programming will focus on American art and culture in conjunction with Pop Art at Princeton and the museum's two other special exhibitions, "Treasures from Olana: Landscapes by Frederic Edwin Church," on view through June 10, and "Sorcerers of the Fifth Heaven: Ancient Nahua Art and Ritual of Southern Mexico," up through April 28.

The Princeton University Art Museum is in the center of the Princeton University campus. For information, www.princetonartmuseum.org or 609-258-3788.