Pop Art in Italy: the history and artists of an unexpected movement 

The term Pop Art is short for “Popular Art.”

The term “popular” here means “mass” because it appropriates the means of mass communication and new technologies to create artworks. 

To think that these days “popular” art is bought for such astronomical sums!

 The history of Italian Pop Art

Pop Art in Italy came  with the Venice Biennale of ’64, where the works of American pop artists were presented. 

The movement took root most firmly in Rome and spread from there. 

 

 Who are the most famous artists in the history of Italian Pop Art

The most famous artists of Italian Pop Art include Mario Schifano, Mimmo Rotella, Giosetta Fioroni, Mario Ceroli, Cesare Tacchi, Valerio Adami, and Emilio Tadini, and others. 

The Artists of Piazza del Popolo 

Among the artists of the School of Piazza del Popolo were: Mario Schifano, Tano Festa, Franco Angeli, Mimmo Rotella, Giosetta Fioroni, Mario Ceroli, Cesare Tacchi, and Renato Mambor. 

Mimmo Rotella  

Mimmo Rotella’s artistic path (Catanzaro 1918-Milan 2006) began as a figurative painter before he became an abstract-geometric painter.

His first solo show was in 1951 at the Chiurazzi Gallery in Rome. He exhibited in Paris in the same year at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles.

A Fulbright Foundation grant took him to Kansas City in Missouri between 1951 and 1952, first as a student and then as an artist in residence. 

Here he met Rauschenberg, Oldenburg, Cy Twombly, Pollock, and Klein. 

He returned to Rome and worked in a studio near Piazza del Popolo. 

His signature technique was décollage. 

Italian Pop Art and American Pop Art: Commonalities and Differences 

Italian Pop Art draws inspiration from its centuries-old classical tradition.

For instance, consider how Tano Festa reinterpreted Michelangelo’s Adam in the Sistine Chapel in Pop Art style.

Franco Angeli’s she-wolf. 

Mario Ceroli‘s avenging angel, drawn from the Apocalypse. He specifically references the sculpture that looms over Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome

                     

American Pop Art, in constrast, is steeped in American culture of advertising and comics.

Italian Pop Art, and Pop shared images of Marilyn Monroe, Liz Taylor, Jackie Kennedy to name a few icons, through the works of Andy Warhol, Martial Raysse, Tom Wesselmann, Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Hamilton, Mimmo Rotella, Allen Jones, and Gerhard Richter.

When and where Pop Art began 

1962 was the year of Pop Art’s triumph in New York.

It was the opening of a group show at the Sidney Janis Gallery on 57th Street.

Twenty-nine artists took part, including Jim Dine, Tom Wesselmann, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, George Segal, and Andy Warhol, dubbed the “new realists.”

A few weeks later, on December 13, 1962, the event’s importance was emphasized when MOMA, the Museum of Modern Art organized a round table on the controversial phenomenon called Pop Art. 

All the best artists that were part of the round table had a solo show that same year in a New York gallery.

An impressive number of art works were made in those 12 months. 

Many of them are now in museums and considered Pop Art classics. 

Background of the Pop Art phenomenon

By the mid-1950s, the solitary, furious action painting of Jackson Pollock, Yves Kline and the other abstract expressionist artists who had thrown their inner worlds onto the canvas with their intellectual and existential tensions,  had started to run dry and generate lackluster imitators.

Rauschenberg made the dramatic and highly emblematic gesture of buying a drawing by De Kooning, erasing it and then exhibiting it with the title Erased De Kooning Drawing. 

In 1958 Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns exhibited at Leo Castelli for the first time.

Their art suggested a new expression to the generation that came after them, a new artistic and ideological form.

Rauschenberg included everyday objects such as radios, bottles, clocks, and fans in an abstract expressionist context. 

Johns used painted layers to intervene on a clear image of flag or target, transforming objects into paintings.

The importance of Pop Art 

As I see it, Pop Art turned the concept of art on its head.

Andy Warhol reproduced silkscreen images taken from newspapers, consumer goods, and posters. His mechanical, cold ‘art’ created the effect of documentary realism, subverting the traditional concept of art as a human artifact.

“If you take a Campbell’s Soup can and repeat it fifty times, you are not interested in the retinal image. What interests you is the concept that wants to put fifty Campbell’s Soup cans on a canvas.” Marcel Duchamp 

         

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