Pop by Hal Foster

Pop by Hal Foster

"Modern art and design continues to fillet the movement once known as Pop, so Phaidon’s new monograph is a timely look back.. Pop has it all, not just the iconic big-name images... Editor Mark Francis [...] has dug a little deeper and drawn together film, photography and even architecture."—Wallpaper*

"What makes the book indispensable is the inclusion of documents in which the artists, critics and theorists speak for themselves."—Martin Coomer, Time Out

"If you're looking for last-minute Christmas presents for your art-loving friends, you could do a lot worse than this. Divided into three sections - the survey by Hal Foster, a gazetteer of works and a selection of contemporary documents - this book could replace a whole bookshelf in your art library... It's a formula that should ensure that this book is one of the essential reference works on the Pop-art era."—Mark Rappolt, Modern Painters

"The many strengths of this absorbing, eclectically detailed survey are concentrated most in the cultural historical networking that is achieved between image and text. What results is in part a luxurious and luxuriating immersion in the sheer visual gorgeousness of much Pop material, and in part a digest and directory of Pop's great works, sources and related texts - Pop's greatest hits, so to speak... Pop art ought never to be consigned to some ever-expanding repertoire of stylish retro-aesthetics. It is the cultural link between Surrealism and Postmodernism, and often made statements about the modern world that have yet to be improved, or updated."—Michael Bracewell, Art Monthly

Mark Francis is a London-based curator and writer. A director of Gagosian Gallery, he was formerly Chief Curator of the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, and its Founding Director. In 2001 he directed and edited the catalogue for the exhibition 'Les Années Pop', Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

Hal Foster is Townsend Martin Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University and a former Senior Editor of Art in America. He is the editor of The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (1983) and Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (1985), and the author of Compulsive Beauty (1993) and The Return of the Real (1996).