"Artists have been fascinated by photography since the invention of the camera, but in the 1960s the combination of photos, film and mass reproduction spawned the media age," said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. "The real story of pop art, this compact but brilliant show suggests, is how painters responded to the secondhand nature of experience, the replacement of real life by mechanical images."
It is subtitled "Portraiture from Francis Bacon to Andy Warhol", but Bacon is an "outlier": most of the works are from the "plastic fantastic" age. "Icons of the 1960s float by like lonely astronauts": Yuri Gagarin smiling in Joe Tilson's "Gagarin, Star, Triangle" (1968); Ursula Andress emerging from the sea in the Bond film "Dr. No" in Colin Self's 1965 collage featuring a nuclear fallout shelter sign; Marilyn Monroe in publicity shots screenprinted by Richard Hamilton in "My Marilyn" (1965). Although it takes up just one room, this exhibition at Bath's Holburne Museum is a fresh and "fascinating rethink" of a much-mythologised artistic movement.
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