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James Rosenquist with presenter Alastair SookeBBC/Jude Ho

All completelyauthentic – except that thetins, boxes and cartonswere totally empty

Pop went the easel, and more, as we were offered a worldwide tour – NewYork, LA, London, Paris, Shanghai – of the art phenomenon of the past 50years (still going strong worldwide). We were led by a wide­eyedinterlocutor, the bright­eyed and bushy­tailed Alastair Sooke, to thethrobbing beat of – what else? – pop music, Elvis and much else besides.

Sooke protested a bit too much, doing down the previous big deal in modern art,Abstract Expressionism, in order to enhance the revolutionary nature of Pop in itsfascination and appropriation of the tropes of advertising and consumerism. Heinfectiously enjoyed driving about under the Californian sun in a snazzy blackconvertible, at least one of the benefits of the American dream. With the subtitle"How Pop Art Changed the World", his thesis was stimulating, intriguing and attimes persuasive, not only that Pop used capitalist techniques to subversive ends,but visually predicted the sweep – and even destructive nature – of globalcapitalism. In other words, the world and Pop marched hand and hand into theconsumer hell, Pop sniggering along the way.

This made it fitting that the chronologicalnarrative concluded with an interview with theShanghai­based contemporary Chinese artistXu Zhen. Obviously really, really smart, XuZhen even looked like a young banker, black­framed spectacles and all. He has his owncompany called MadeIn, a successful yet alsoironic commentary in itself on corporate

conceits, dedicated to the production of creativity (sic). He has the ideas, andemployees carry them out with a variety of craft and mechanical skills.

He premiered at an art fair showing his own supermarket (pictured below), wherecustomers could buy from endless rows of packaged goods, all completelyauthentic – except that the tins, boxes and cartons were totally empty. Our Alastairmarvelled at how a Coca Cola tin, standard­looking and well­sealed, could have

The Americaneconomy, thefeisty Rosenquisttold us, is builton sellingweapons of war,his country’sprosperity stilldependent on themilitary anddefence

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Soup Cans and Superstars, BBC FourPanorama of Pop art from Alastair Sooke ahead of the Tate Modern show

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8/29/2015 Soup Cans and Superstars, BBC Four | TV reviews, news & interviews | The Arts Desk

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marvelled at how a Coca Cola tin, standard­looking and well­sealed, could havenothing at all in it. As Andy Warhol said, good business is the best art. An extralayer of irony was accorded Xu Zhen’s oblique and even hilarious critique ofcapitalism by the programme's broadcast coinciding with a stock market dip basedon economic bad news from China.

We began in New York, meeting the survivors from the 1960s, interspersed withfilm clips of those who have departed, from Andy Warhol, in a sense the leader ofthe pack, to Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg. The tone was set with avery emotive interview with James Rosenquist who, as a young man, had migratedto New York from Minnesota, and earned his living in the late 1950s working in adangerous and skilled job painting the enormous billboards which are still such ascenic feature of the city. Rosenquist (main picture, with Sooke) is only in hisearly 80s – late middle­age by today’s standards – but played the laconic ancientburdened by old age to perfection, finally confounding his interviewer by saying hewas tired. His F­111 (1964­1965), a 23­section painting 86 feet in length, is one ofthe defining images of Pop, depicting what was then the most technologicallyadvanced fighter bomber of the Vietnam war. The American economy, the feistyRosenquist told us, is built on selling weapons of war, his country’s prosperity stilldependent, he sadly and realistically noted, on the military and defence. Plus çachange.

Pop artists in the 1960s were defined by the old guard and the critics as the NewVulgarians, accused of unfiltered appropriation of magazine and newspaperimagery. However, Sooke showed us the differences with a Lichtenstein bathingbeauty painting and its original source, the artist turning and manipulating his foundimage into something meaningful, memorable and critical. The incredibly impassiveAndy Warhol was something else: he ruthlessly used screen­printing to mass­produce his prints: as he said, he would make a portrait for anybody who asked,basing the image on his own one­off photograph, for $40,000 a pop, pununintentional. He even had a line in portraits of dogs. He was the court painter ofhis day, the Van Eyck of his era, starting appropriately with a whizzy career indrawings for fashion ads.

Two other American titans were interviewed. At 86, Claes Oldenburg was the elder,his career moving from 1960s happenings to huge replications of items from ice­cream cones to clothes pins. (Unseen, alas, was his unrealised project for a hugeball and cock for the Thames, to flush it away.) The younger was Ed Ruscha, thekid from Oklahoma now more than at home in Hollywood, the chronicler of parkinglots and garages, not to mention the iconic HOLLYWOOD sign and otherinescapable American motifs. He turned out to be a self­proclaimed patriot, ironicyes, but loving too towards the emblems and symbols of the USA.

And so to London, the swinging London of the 1960s and the jiving generation ofbrilliance at the Royal College of Art, caught in black and white footage of youngartists dancing away before they were claimed by celebrity (or tragedy). GorgeousPauline Boty, who died all too young, and yes, there was Hockney, and PeterBlake (pictured below, with Sooke), and a host of others. Allen Jones, he of thestiletto shoes attached to endless female legs, still causing scandal with hissculptures of naked women that you sit on, was actually expelled from the RCA.

The case was made bySooke – and is made bythe chronology – thatthe first appropriationsof the imagery ofpopular culture andmass consumption weremade by these gentlyanarchic British artists.But while American Popart rapidly reached abroad audience, its finalaccolade

a ferociously condemnatory article in Life magazine, the British variant took longerto reach its audience. The Independent Group started to meet at the Institute ofContemporary Art in 1952, its creative catalyst Eduardo Paolozzi, the multimediaartist who was also the master of the scrapbook, raiding advertising and comics forimagery.

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Richard Hamilton's iconic, seminal collage Just what is it that makes today’s homesso different, so appealing, with lollipop saying POP among its bodybuilders andmovie stars, dates from 1956, and the group of like­minded artists at the This IsTomorrow show at the Whitechapel in the same year incorporated their iconoclasticviews, much influenced by then­guru Marshall McLuhan: the medium is themessage. Peter Blake traced his fascination to his war time trauma of childhoodexile and countryside evacuation to a religious fanatic. His Self­portrait withBadges, 1961, and the record cover created with his first wife Jann Haworth for SgtPepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band, 1967, confirms that Pop was really a Britishinnovation. Typically, the Brits invented, but failed to exploit. Even SwingingLondon could not replicate American energy, nor the commercial gallery backing.

A real revelation for the Anglophone viewer was the use of Pop in the carry­on of1968, the revolution that never was, as we were introduced to the Atelier Populairewhich, using Warhol’s innovative screen print techniques, churned out hundreds ofposters daily posted all over Paris in response to the événements.

Jude Ho's film was impressive and informative, and even Sooke’s naïvely sinceregeneralisations of Pop’s undying importance and significance had a provocativecharm of their own. In three weeks time The World Goes Pop opens at TateModern, taking a look at how the genre developed in the 1960s and 1970s – so wecan test it all out for ourselves.

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