Europop

Pop Art, which first came up in London during the 1950s, and was given its name by the English art critic Lawrence Alloway in the 1960s, soon achieved the status of a global phenomenon: The joyful turn towards the trivial was now in the foreground and art turned away from the striving of abstract or gestural art towards heroism and grandeur. Especially in the USA, artists like Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns discovered everyday consumption and commerce as a theme for their art. But Europe also took an interest in Pop. The exhibition in the Kunsthaus Zurich, curated by Tobia Bezzola and Franziska Lentzsch, assembled eighty works of European Pop Art by more than twenty artists from ten countries, works which had been made between 1950 and 1970. Represented were such famous names as Gerhard Richter, Claes Oldenburg and David Hockney—and as one of the few female artists Niki de Saint Phalle. More or less as American guests, there were works by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Tom Wesselmann. From Switzerland there were only two Pop Art artists: Franz Gertsch and Peter Stämpfli. It is a matter of debate whether there is such a thing as ‘Europop’ at all. Indeed, the interlocking of the old world and the new is considerable and the rise of the USA to the leading nation of culture is also due to the large numbers of emigrants, who left their mark on such media as cinema, advertising, comics, and science fiction. In the same way, Pop is unthinkable without Dada. According to the curator Bezzola, ‘Flippancy and the rejection of depth became serious options.’ As a phenomenon, Pop drew the American and European powers together, which since the Cold War had entered into a close relationship not only in national security matters but also in cultural ones. Indeed, Pop is less style, form or technique than an attitude, an awareness of life, a debate with mass culture. The attitude can be naively admiring, or ironically parodistic, or critically subversive. Is Europop per se more critical than the American variant? Alice Henkes wrote in the Basellandschaftliche Zeitung: ‘Critical awareness is, as the show suggests, not a matter of geography but of personality.’ The exhibition was met with positive resonance in the media. Sabine Altdorfer negatively commented on the absence of the numerous Swiss Pop artists, who could be seen in the Kunstmuseum Thun in 2006 (Basellandschaftliche Zeitung). Barbara Basting asserted that ‘with a wealth of nuance, the first truly international exchange of art works’ was made visible (Tages-Anzeiger). The catalogue volume was issued by DuMont and contains a very readable essay by Tobia Bezzola.