Dorothy Herzka | Pop Art One

Dorothy Herzka

Pop Art One

New York City, USA: Publishing Institute of American Art, 1965

16 pp., 15 × 19 cm., spiral bound with loose leaves

Edition size unknown

One of the earliest documents of the New York Pop Art scene, this uniquely designed publication was edited by Dorothy Herzka. Herzka moved to Manhattan at the age of 24, to work at the Bianchini Gallery, on the Upper East Side. The following year, the gallery staged the exhibition The American Supermarket [see previous post] where she met her future husband.  

“We asked Roy [Lichtenstein] and Andy [Warhol] if they’d put an image on a shopping bag. I met Roy when he came in to sign the shopping bags,” she told Gagosian Quarterly in 2018. They married in 1968 and were together until his death in 1997. Dorothy died at her home in Southampton, New York on July 4, 2024, at the age of 84.

Pop Art One is comprised of twenty-seven loose leaf plates by Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Tom Wesselmann, and Warhol. It includes brief biographical notes and small photographic portraits of the artists.

The cover and pages of text are cut lengthwise in half, with plastic-comb binding on the outer edge of each half, folding together in the centre to enclose the portfolio of loose plates. The cover was held together with a sticker designed by Lichtenstein, though few of these survived, as the had to be torn for the book to be opened. 

Copies sell for between four and five hundred dollars. 

American Pop Art, 106 Forms of Love and Despair

Billy Klüver and Öyvind Fahlström

American Pop Art, 106 Forms of Love and Despair

Stockholm, Sweden:  Moderna Museet, 1964

112 pp., 22 x 22 cm., staple-bound

Edition size unknown

An early Pop Art exhibition catalogue, produced to accompany the show of the same name which ran from February 29th to April 12th, 1964. Artists included Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, George Segal, Andy Warhol and Tom Wesselman.

"This catalogue, created for an exhibition curated by Pontus Hultén (1924–2006)—director of the Moderna Museet between 1958 and 1973—was its own peculiar work of art. The show was a close read of seven then up-and-coming artists utilizing Pop imagery and populist subjects. This seemingly unfussy staple-bound book contained pictures of artworks that were printed, aside from a few tip-in plates, entirely in duotone. Imagine a world where we might know and remember Roy Lichtenstein’s or Claes Oldenburg’s or George Segal’s art in peachy pink and magenta, muddy green and gray. This volume offered up a subversive Pop idea—that these psychedelic reproductions depicting different paintings and sculptures could have (or should have) appeared this way in real life. It anticipates a world where images as we experience them are and are not what they seem.”

- Alex Da Corte

Socks

 

Roy Lichtenstein | Preparatory mock-ups for Hat

[see below post]

Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein was born on this day in 1923. 

Andy Warhol | The Thirteen Most Wanted Men (Dossier No 2357)

Andy Warhol

The Thirteen Most Wanted Men (Dossier No 2357)

Paris, France: Sonnabend Gallery, 1967

27 × 18 cm.

Edition size unknown

Andy Warhol reportedly only produced a single public artwork in his lifetime, and it was on display for less than forty-eight hours. 

New York State Governor Nelson Rockefeller had invited architect Philip Johnson to design the New York State Pavilion for the 1964 New York World’s Fair. Johnson identified ten then-nascent artists and commissioned them to produce works to adorn the exterior of the Pavilion’s circular Theaterama: Peter Agostini, John Chamberlain, Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Alexander Lieberman, Robert Mallary, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist and Warhol. 

Lichtenstein contributed a laughing comic-strip woman leaning out a window, Rauschenberg created a collage of 1960's American history featuring President Kennedy called Skyway,  Kelly paired large curved monochromatic forms, and Indiana contributed a blinking sign that read “EAT.” 

Warhol proposed something a little more controversial. 

John Giorno attributes the idea to painter Wynn Chamberlain, who was dating an NYPD officer at the time. Chamberlain was said to have provided Warhol with a large envelope filled with various archival crime photographs and mug shots. 

Warhol elected to enlarge thirteen of them, which were silkscreened onto square Masonite panels, and tiled together. The work was installed on April 15, 1964, and triggered numerous objections. It was painted over two days later, before the event had opened. 

Press reports from the time initially suggested that Warhol was dissatisfied with the installation but it was later revealed that Rockefeller - no stranger to censoring artists - himself had demanded the work be removed. In addition to the piece featuring thugs and criminals (a baby killer among them) seven of the men were Italian and the governor balked at alienating that community while running for re-election. 

A 2014 exhibition commemorating the saga featured a telegram from Warhol to the NY State Dept of Public Works,  giving permission to paint over the canvas:

Gentlemen:

This serves to confirm that you are hereby authorized to paint over my mural in the New York State Pavilion in a color suitable to the architect.

Very truly yours,

Andrew Warhol

Other accounts cite Warhol's choice of silver paint being related to his tin foil and mirror covered walls at the Factory, which he was putting together at the time. 

Warhol also produced a replacement for the mural, 25 identical Masonite panels each depicting the smiling face of World’s Fair President Robert Moses, who was likely to have been thought of as the main censor to the project at the time. It was never installed and its whereabouts are currently unknown. 

A couple of years later he revisited the 13 Most Wanted screens, using them to produce a series of diptych paintings on canvas, which were exhibited at the Sonnabend Gallery in Paris. This publication - rare enough to not be included in the multi-volume catalogue raisonné - is from that exhibition. It includes six loose leaves featuring exhibition documentation, a text by Otto Hahn and a silkscreen portrait of Most Wanted Men No. 11, John Joseph H., Jr.

Warhol enjoyed a good double-entendre and the use of the word "Wanted" in the title undoubtedly referred not only to the criminals' fugitive status, but also their desirability and potential to be seen as 

heartthrobs. A later work,  the screen test film The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys - makes the connection clearer. 

Morrissey carried this torch forward, with his use of vintage portraits repurposed as album cover art and band shirt graphics, as well as his glamorization of criminals such as the Kray Twins. 

Note: Robert Indiana's project was also 'censored' from the fair shortly after it opened. Apparently his EAT sign was misconstrued by fair goers as an announcement that the building contained a food court. 

Roy Lichtenstein | Pyramid

Roy Lichtenstein
Pyramid
New York City, USA: Self-published, 1968
37.6 cm x 50.2 cm x 50.2 cm.
Edition of 300 signed and numbered copies


A colour screenprint on lightweight card stock board folded into a 3-dimensional object, printed by Fine Creations, Inc., New York. The edition size is listed as three hundred, but reportedly the impressions were stacked together too soon after printing, before the ink had fully dried, leaving more than two thirds of the edition unfit for release. Lichtenstein estimates that only between fifty and one hundred were ever made available for sale, as well as some artists' proofs. I found number 60 at auction, here, number 64 here, and number 97, here, suggesting that Lichtenstein's estimates were on the low side.

The estimated value is around five grand, depending on condition.

Several paintings of pyramids were produced around the same time:

"Lichtenstein did not turn to the pyramidal form at random. Pyramids were popular amongst the 1960s minimalists; a shape that a number of them called upon. Principal amongst the exponents of this motif was Sol Lewitt who made massive outdoor pyramids from blocks of stone, and indoor versions in trademark cubes of wood; he even extrapolated the form into his wall drawings and experimented with different geometric iterations. Meanwhile, in 1964, Robert Morris created the celebrated Corner Piece sculpture, now owned by the Guggenheim Museum, which re-articulated the gallery space, relating to the viewer on an immediate physical and temporal basis. Flavin took a different approach to exploring the pyramid shape when he created the series of Monuments for Tatlin during the late 1960s. This was minimalism as figuration; in pre-fabricated neon tubes, he approximated Vladimir Tatlin’s proposed design for the Monument to the Third International (1919-120): the Bolshevik cenotaph would have dwarfed the Eiffel tower if realised. Flavin’s homage to it is semi-ironic: simplistic where the proposed monument was a complex structure of intricate design. The glow of Flavin’s pre-fabricated neon tubes seem to parodise the traditional grandeur of overpowering architecture.

Like Flavin, Lichtenstein was working in a representational manner in Pyramids; his shapes are not just exercises in abstract geometry, but rather, with yellow monochromatic ground and grisaille shadow and sky, they are graphic reductions of architectonic landscapes. In this regard, Lichtenstein can be seen as one of a number of artists in the Twentieth Century who have called upon the Pyramids as subject matter. Gerhard Richter created paintings of pyramids in 1964 and 1966 in his idiosyncratic photo-painting style. Like Lichtenstein, he found that the iconic nature of the Egyptian Pyramids allowed for total recognisability, even when refracted through the prism of a conceptually advanced painterly style.  In the years following Lichtenstein’s work, Keith Haring used pyramids regularly. He valued them for their symbolic portent, for in American culture in the 1960s,’70s, and ‘80s, Pyramids were closely associated with UFO sightings and extra-terrestrial life, based on the 'Ancient Astronauts' conspiracy theorists, who argued that many sites like the Pyramids at Giza were built by visiting aliens in ancient and prehistoric times. In this light, it is interesting to note that a possible source of inspiration may have been a House of Secrets comic strip, which showed an alien life form hovering near a great pyramid.

Pyramids is on one level an exemplar of Roy Lichtenstein’s 1960s praxis: a bold, graphic depiction of an instantly recognisable subject, executed in bright colour that evokes the aesthetic of popular comic books. Yet, in other respects, it represents a dramatic progression within his style; a move towards a more sophisticated, even academic approach to art, where formal qualities are valued on the same level as poetic meaning. It is a work of dramatic immediacy that is immediately recognisable as Lichtenstein. In this regard, we are reminded of the artist’s 1988 assessment: “All painters take a personal attitude toward painting. What makes each object in the work is that it is organized by that artist’s vision. The style and the content are also different from anyone else’s. They are unified by the point of view – mine. This is the big tradition of art” (Roy Lichtenstein cited in: Calvin Tomkins, Roy Lichtenstein: Mural with Blue Brushstroke, New York 1988, p. 42)."

- Sotheby's auction catalogue