Soup Cans & Superstars: How Pop Art Changed the World

In 1963, Andy Warhol, pop art's most controversial figure, armed himself

with his new Bolex camera and set off on an epic road trip

from New York to a city 2,500 miles away...

..LA.

MUSIC: Walk Like A Man by Frankie Valli And The Four Seasons

Warhol wrote about his journey later and he said,

"It was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me.

"The further west we drove, the more pop everything looked.

"We were seeing the future and we knew it for sure."

Inspired by the billboards,

signs and advertisements now littering the American landscape,

Warhol and his fellow pop artists

created some of the most memorable images of the 20th century.

But in those early years, not everybody found pop irresistible.

Warhol embodied everything

that the critics found so repellent about pop art.

It wasn't just his art, it was his personality

that appeared so trivial, so shallow,

naively obsessed with these celebrities

and infatuated with banal consumer goods.

With its processed food, platinum pin-ups

and weeping comic book heroines,

pop appeared to do little more than copy tawdry commercial sources.

To critics, it was an outright betrayal

of the brainy tradition of modern art.

In short, pop seemed tacky and lightweight - a vacuous fad.

But, in fact, for all its look-at-me glamour

and cartoonish surfaces, pop offered modern art to the masses,

using the lessons of advertising to sell a far more ambiguous,

often critical portrait of the dawning consumer age.

To discover how pop art had the last laugh,

I'm going to track down some of the artists who blazed its trail

by using the imagery of advertising

to expose the dark side of the American Dream.

Our whole economy is built on selling war weapons.

I think it's wrong.

Creating an art form

that would provide a brilliant parody of the consumer age.

All of our environment seems to be made up

partially of the desire to sell products.

This is the landscape that I'm interested in portraying.

I'll explore pop's colourful legacy around the globe.

It is on wheels, you can dance with it if you want.

And discover how today, in our globalised, mass consumerist age,

pop's subversive wit is inspiring generations afresh.

-Oh, it's empty?

-Yeah.

How have you actually got the Coke out?

It's high time that we stopped thinking about pop art

as the brash, adolescent show-off of modern art

that had shouted itself hoarse by the end of the '60s.

In fact, pop just isn't as dumb or as vacuous

as sometimes it might appear and I think, like the best art of any age,

it holds up a mirror to the times that reflects back the obsessions

of the modern world in all their Technicolor, tarnished glory.

And once pop's raucous spirit had been unleashed,

for more than 50 years, it couldn't be contained so that even now,

for artists working in the 21st century,

it remains as relevant as ever.

Brash and full of swagger,

pop art made its assault on New York City at the outset of the '60s.

Within a period of just 12 months,

five young artists each mounted their first major solo show -

Claes Oldenburg,

Tom Wesselmann,

Roy Lichtenstein,

James Rosenquist,

Andy Warhol.

These artists would become pop art's superstars.

What's surprising is that they didn't subscribe

to any pop art manifesto.

The artists worked in total isolation,

completely unaware that others out there shared their vision.

Henry Geldzahler,

who was this really important curator at the Metropolitan Museum

and an early champion of pop art,

he later told Andy Warhol, "It was like a science fiction movie.

"You pop artists in different parts of the city, unknown to each other,

"rising up out of the muck

"and staggering forth with your paintings in front of you."

Does that seem odd to you,

that you all began to look at the world in the same way?

Erm, I think we just read a lot of comic books.

But the pop artists had more in common than a love of comic books -

they were all obsessed with the new media age.

We stand today on the edge of a new frontier -

the frontier of the 1960s.

# I was walking down the street

# When this boy started following me... #

This was the era when the Machiavellian executives

on Madison Avenue persuaded the American population that success,

love, in fact every aspect of life, was something they could buy.

-There's the car I told you about. Do you like it?

-Yeah! It's sure smooth.

Andy Warhol became New York's highest-paid illustrator

and, like him, his fellow pop artists

had one foot in the commercial world.

Dabbling in graphic design,

commercial illustration and sign painting,

these artists knew the dark arts of selling the American Dream.

And in the beginning,

critics took their commercial origins as proof that,

far from being an art of social protest,

pop was an art of capitulation.

And one of the prime offenders was pop pioneer James Rosenquist,

who'd started out as a sign painter aged 17.

The huge billboards he created sold anything from whisky to hair curlers

and the proceeds put this farmboy from the Midwest through art school.

When Rosenquist arrived in New York aged just 21 in 1955,

he had less than 300 in his pocket and, over the next few years,

he carried on scratching out a living painting billboards.

He later said that these billboard jobs were his painting laboratory.

He didn't realise it at the time,

but they taught him not only how to become a painter,

but also specifically how to become an artist who painted pop.

Packed with the imagery of plenty,

Rosenquist's vast, kaleidoscopic paintings

were initially understood as a blatant celebration of capitalism.

In fact, their critics couldn't have been further from the truth.

Lily?

-Yes?

-Have you got the elevator?

-Yes.

-That's good.

-HE GROANS

-Shall I get the door for you?

If you want.

-You've had it revamped?

-Totally.

Re-welded, new cables, new motor.

-I love this lever.

-Good.

You can't have it, it's got to stay here.

As a young man in New York,

Rosenquist yearned to become a serious abstract artist.

His day job as a sign painter not only paid the bills,

but also provided him with leftover paint for free.

So, what was life like in those very early days?

Cheap. I mean, New York was such a wild place.

So capitalistic that I would get laid off on Friday

cos they didn't have any more work.

The next morning, they'd call me.

"Jimmy! Come back to work!"

They had another big job for me to do.

Cos it was just, like, cut-throat.

Were people hurt doing this work?

-Yeah, they got killed.

-People you knew?

-Oh, yeah.

Fell off a wall. Splat!

It was art school for me. Tough.

Tough, tough art school.

'By 1959, at the age of only 25,

'Rosenquist was one of the most successful sign painters in New York City.'

And how proud did you feel

once you had completed one of these giant billboards?

I mean, someone once said you were the biggest artist on Broadway.

How proud did you feel when you looked at them?

I didn't feel proud at all.

Here I am painting these huge, blown-up, empty images

that have no meaning.

'Around 1960, Rosenquist quit the commercial world

'and rented a studio full-time.

'It was here that he began to co-opt the imagery of advertising

'for his own very different intentions.'

So, are these examples of the original works,

-the planning stage of the paintings?

-Yep, yep.

-This is clipped out from a magazine advertisement.

-Yeah.

I just wanted the stark imagery.

'The compositions may look random,

'but they were guided by specific ideas.'

It looks here like you're taking examples

of some of the promises that capitalism is bombarding us with -

you can have your Ford, you can have fine clothes or the lure of women,

whatever it is, and actually sort of showing that that promise

is a bit empty, a bit hollow, a bit blank.

Everything is, according to Zen.

Everything, everything, not just America, not capitalism.

This sense of the spiritual runs throughout Rosenquist's work.

A search for truth in a material age.

And in the 1960s, the Vietnam war embodied

the horror at the heart of America's consumerist dream.

It was this that inspired Rosenquist's masterpiece.

F-111 is made up of 23 sections and is a staggering 86 feet in length.

Taking its name from a notorious fighter bomber,

the painting yokes together imagery of war

with a vision of abundance back home in boom-time America.

A girl sitting beneath a bomb-shaped hairdryer,

a beach umbrella and atomic mushroom cloud,

a diver gasping for air.

The plane forms the painting's spine.

Its ingenious composition reveals the collusion between the media,

advertising and the Vietnam death machine.

What did inspire you to make F-111, then?

The idea of paying income taxes to make war weapons.

Our whole economy is built on selling war weapons.

I think it's wrong.

That's one of the really famous images that you created with

Kennedy and some cake.

What did he offer you as a candidate?

A Chevrolet and a piece of cake.

People talk about pop, they talk about your work in particular

and often say it's a piece of processed art in some way.

I hope so.

I like that.

I hope so.

-I'm getting tired.

-Sure.

At points I found talking to Jim Rosenquist quite tough.

He's got a certain carapace, an exterior which is gruff

and, for me, felt like a vestige of perhaps a way that he had to

learn to be when he was a sign painter in the '50s.

That toughness never left him nor his art because he was

unambiguous, these were not paintings celebrating

everything he saw around him in the city and it was indicative

of the motivating force of pop even from the beginning,

not just in his work but generally. That it isn't

this mode that uncritically, slavishly champions everyday life,

the consumer world, American capitalism.

It's much more questioning, it's probing

and, at its best, like Rosenquist in person, it's tough.

Pop art may have played dumb

but its shiny surface often masks a darker scepticism

about the state of America, its politics,

its wars, its wider culture, all ensnared by consumerism.

The irony is, the art form that

ripped off the mass media has

today been ripped off itself.

Used to sell everything

from fizzy drinks to cosmetics.

A case in point is the comic-book style

of Roy Lichtenstein,

still so ubiquitous it can seem bland.

Yet when he and his fellow pop artists emerged

in the early '60s,

they were considered despicable hoodlums

responsible for the most shocking

movement in the history of art.

Only one man could really have made this mural, Roy Lichtenstein.

He epitomises the whole pop generation.

In fact, he pioneered it at the beginning of the '60s

and this has got all of the hallmarks of his mature pop style.

Those heavy black outlines, the bold primary colours

of red and yellow and blue

and also those dots imitating cheap reproductive techniques that

you find in advertisements in newspapers and magazines.

And now, everyone's passing by, we all take it for granted,

we accept it but, at the beginning of the '60s, art like this was

provocative, it was dangerous and it was infuriating.

Lichtenstein was part of an important early show of Pop,

at the Sidney Janis Gallery,

and when Mark Rothko and some of his generation saw the show,

they found Lichtenstein's work so difficult

that they actually resigned from the gallery in protest.

For Rothko and his peers,

pop wasn't just crass, vulgar nonsense -

it was anti-art.

Rothko, like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning,

was part of an older generation of artists,

who, since the '40s, had dominated New York's art scene.

They took painting very seriously indeed.

The Abstract Expressionists were on a difficult journey inwards

to unleash volcanic energies on canvas.

Through painting, they believed they could convey

grand, essential truths about the human condition -

tragedy, ecstasy, doom.

To the general public,

Abstract Expressionism was pretentious codswallop -

its claims, downright ludicrous -

but for those immersed in its lofty ideas, representation was dead.

So, the work of Lichtenstein

and the so-called New Vulgarians came like an acid shock -

a slap in the face to philistines and art buffs alike.

A rejection of the modern art tradition in favour of idiocy

and tongue-in-cheek irony.

But Lichtenstein's intentions had gone way over their heads.

One of the biggest misconceptions about Roy Lichtenstein

is that he simply copied his sources and then put them

in a gallery without any alteration. It just isn't true.

This, for instance, is his early pop painting Girl With Ball, from 1961,

and this was his source.

It's a black and white newspaper advertisement for a holiday resort

which had appeared in the New York Times earlier the same year,

and the funny thing is that, in a way, it's the differences

between these two images which are more striking than the similarities.

But perhaps the subtlest, craftiest part of the painting

is the woman's shiny hairdo, because there,

Lichtenstein is parodying those swirling brushstrokes

of the abstract expressionists, which, by now, were such a cliche.

There's nothing spontaneous about the application of paint

in this image. Everything is meticulously done. It's mechanical.

It's about Lichtenstein suppressing his own painterly touch.

So, this is a surprisingly complex and sophisticated painting, which is

in dialogue with other art as much as it is with the real world.

Lichtenstein's work represents a radical shift in modern art.

Exploding the exalted, inward-looking world of

abstract expressionism,

pop brilliantly created art from imagery that anyone

walking down the street could recognise in an instant.

All of the mechanical things - the dots,

the black lines around everything, the more or less primary colours -

all of this was just something ready-made to symbolise

what we were really getting into, a kind of a ready-made, plastic era.

And it was pop's smart playfulness that made it

so appealing to the public.

Still, in January 1964, Life Magazine published an article

posing a rather provocative question:

"Is he the worst artist in the US?"

This well-known article is often given as evidence of the brutal way

that pop art, at the time, was dismissed as tedious and banal,

but what people don't realise is that Lichtenstein actually

gave his blessing to its infamous headline

because he relished the provocative irony of it.

So, what I think is much more interesting about this piece

is that it reveals, at the start of 1964, Life Magazine,

this enormously influential, widely read American publication

wanted a piece of the whole pop art phenomenon.

This was an all-American publication, celebrating a new,

irreverent, and crucially, all-American, style of art.

And if Lichtenstein is the architect of New York pop art,

his rival Andy Warhol is, of course, its superstar -

and for good reason.

The art that Warhol created foretold so many aspects of our world today.

His genius was to realise that in an age of consumerism,

anything could be turned into a commodity -

even a painfully shy and awkward personality, like his.

-Well, what have you done? Have you just sent up some other works?

-Yeah.

-And what were they?

-Erm...

Electric chair paintings.

-Electric chair paintings.

-Yeah.

Well, what is the description of that?

-I don't know. Do you know?

-Well, it's...

Warhol's cold, inane persona was a conscious construction -

the embodiment of the mechanical art style

he began to pioneer in 1962,

with the creation of his Campbell's soup cans.

Seizing the photo silkscreen process,

a commercial technique used to churn out prints,

he turned the touch of the artist into the imprint of a machine.

He christened his studio The Factory, and fashioned

a mode perfectly suited for the age of mass production.

Andy, do you think that pop art has sort of reached the point

where it's becoming repetitious now?

Ah, yes.

Warhol and his art may at first seem cold and blank,

but actually, their cool surfaces belie private obsessions.

His paintings are some of the most unforgettable images

of the 20th century.

-MAN:

-Do you believe in feelings and emotions?

WARHOL: Well, no, I don't, but I have them. I wish I didn't.

What, you would like to get rid of them altogether, would you?

Would be a good idea, yeah.

When one of Warhol's idols, Marilyn Monroe, died of an overdose

in 1962, he drew upon a single publicity shot to create

a definitive statement about two of his obsessions -

celebrity and death.

Warhol may have said, "I want to be a machine,"

but actually, looking at his magnificent Marilyn diptych,

it seems much less mechanical than it otherwise might appear.

On the left, he repeats Marilyn's overly made-up face in lurid colour,

against this garish orange background.

She looks exaggerated, unnatural, artificial,

as if she is being viewed on a television screen

with the colour amped right up to maximum.

This is Marilyn's face as it's endlessly recycled by the media.

But then, at the right, with these black and white faces,

there's much greater wonky variation.

All of these strange smudges and streaks and squeegee marks,

left deliberately visible, reminding us of the artist's hand.

That transition from colour to black and white

is what makes this work of art so powerful and also moving.

It's a very simple conceit, but one that's effective and haunting,

because it feels like a heartfelt expression,

not just about the fragility of celebrity, but also

about something much more personal and profound for Warhol himself -

his own visceral fear of dying.

MUSIC: Africastle by Battles

Suicides, car crashes,

police brutality and executions.

Warhol's Death And Disaster paintings present a punchy,

confrontational, polemical vision.

The sources were images from grisly news reports,

repeated again and again, and again, on canvas.

The paintings articulate something of the mass media's

deadening effect.

Repetition engenders numbness, or as Warhol put it, "boredom".

At odds with the gruesome subject matter

is the brightly coloured background.

Warhol himself observed,

"It's surprising how many people want to hang an electric chair

"on their living room wall,

"especially if the background colour matches the drapes."

In other words, pop art has two faces.

It can be as deep or as shallow as the viewer wants it to be.

So often, it is easy to think that pop art emerged

fully-formed from the head, say, of Andy Warhol or Roy Lichtenstein,

but the story of its emergence is much more complicated,

and as a result, I think, much more exciting.

For all its commercial appeal,

pop art also belongs to a more cerebral tradition,

pioneered by an artist who, in the '50s,

had been all but forgotten.

In 1917, Marcel Duchamp submitted a urinal to an annual exhibition,

and in the process, he invented conceptual art.

His mass-produced,

ready-made sculptures declared that art could be governed

not by painterly skill, but exclusively by the idea behind it,

and in the '50s, young, avant-garde artists were discovering him afresh.

Throughout the city, in dark corners, in draughty lofts,

in basements and disused shops,

they embraced the chaos of modern urban life -

its junk, its refuse, its noise and its symbols.

And one artist could be seen skulking among the city's detritus -

Robert Rauschenberg.

I've always found it difficult to talk about

Marcel Duchamp's work specifically.

His recognition of the lack of art in art,

and the artfulness of everything...

I think is probably his most important contribution.

In 1953, Rauschenberg was so poor that he was surviving on

a food budget of just 15 cents a day.

He just couldn't afford traditional materials,

but he was prodigiously inventive and resourceful.

And so, he turned his poverty to his advantage,

and started scouring the streets for junk,

junk that he could transform into these spellbinding works of art,

that captured something of all of these overlooked aspects

and throwaway textures of the city.

He felt sure that art should not be divorced from reality.

"I don't want a picture to look like something it isn't," he said.

"I want a picture to look like something it is."

Inspired by Duchamp, Rauschenberg incorporated everyday objects

into strange artworks that he called combines.

He's celebrated for bringing real life back into the lofty

orbit of fine art.

Together with his lover, the artist Jasper Johns,

Rauschenberg is the most prominent progenitor of pop,

but another figure, now forgotten, who was making equally

pioneering work, would prove to be the movement's missing link.

Around the same time that Rauschenberg started working on his

combines, another young artist was forging a reputation in the city.

He was gay, he was curiously sociable, yet at the same time

detached, and he was obsessed with celebrity and repetition.

And already, by the 1950s, he was incorporating into his art

photographs of film stars, as well as corporate logos.

Now, his name wasn't Andy Warhol but Ray Johnson,

the greatest artist you've never heard of.

In the late '50s, Ray Johnson was a leading avant-garde artist,

who was just as well known as Rauschenberg and Johns.

Yet, when he died in 1995,

he was a virtual recluse -

his house, filled with boxes of unseen work.

They were discovered by his friend and dealer Frances Beatty...

..and they're now stored here, at the Richard Feigen Gallery.

'They contain proof that Johnson truly was

'one of pop art's pioneers.'

This is one of the most amazing documents about early pop art

and Ray Johnson. These are incredible collages.

Look at the amount of them.

-Look at this. I mean, here's Marlon Brando.

-Right.

-There's William Shakespeare.

-Right.

-There's...

This is a sort of... What's that?

-Some sort of brand of Mexico something or other.

-Right.

That looks like another, kind of, brand name.

'For Johnson, art was about the process, not the product.

'He considered his work a kind of performance art,

'and destroyed almost all of his pop collages.'

These are a group of iconic

early works from '55, '55-'56.

Here you have James Dean, right?

Iconic photograph of James Dean, and what does he do with it?

He puts two Lucky Strikes and they look like mouse ears, right?

It's a reference to the cigarette as well as to Mickey Mouse,

so you have all of those things going on at the same time.

These are really quite extraordinary visual works of art,

in the sense of how early they are, because dealing with logos,

brand names, dealing with iconic film stars - these are all

-the things that pop art would famously do, but much later.

-Right.

And sure enough, a few years later,

another artist would produce some icons of his own.

Andy Warhol was a close friend of Ray Johnson.

When they met in 1956,

Warhol was one of New York's most successful commercial illustrators,

but he was still yearning to be taken seriously as a fine artist.

Their friendship would be mutually beneficial.

Through Warhol, Johnson won commercial commissions.

Through Johnson, Warhol met important avant-garde contacts...

and he became increasingly familiar with Johnson's work.

Picasso said, "Good artists borrow - great artists steal."

But to follow through what you're saying, it's that

Warhol was a genius, therefore he stole Ray Johnson's work.

I think that if Ray were around,

he would not want to be judged by what Warhol took from him,

but by what he did.

MUSIC: Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child by Odetta

He may have created some of America's earliest pop art,

but unlike Warhol, who lusted after fame,

Johnson resisted the spotlight.

In 1968, he was mugged at knife-point.

Traumatised, he fled to Long Island, and became a recluse.

His most famous artwork was his last.

On Friday the 13th of January 1995,

Johnson dived off the Sag Harbour Bridge,

dressed head to toe in black.

Passers-by saw him backstroking into the horizon.

His death really was a death orchestrated like him.

So, do people really think that it was almost like a final performance?

Yeah, I think so,

because Richard Feigen...

went to his studio afterwards,

and there was...

The only thing visible was a photograph of Ray going...

Johnson was a victim of the city that inspired his work,

and his experience points to one of pop art's darkest

and most prescient themes -

how urban life, for all its neon pleasures,

robs us not just of community but also of our very soul.

The daily grind of the city turns us all into grist.

MUSIC: Delia Gone by Acker Bilk

But another of pop's founding fathers decided

he wasn't going to take that lying down.

Claes Oldenburg actively engaged with the city,

and used pop art to change it.

So, just push up and we're going.

See?

Nothing to it.

'Oldenburg was born in Sweden, but he grew up in Chicago.

'At 86, he's the oldest surviving member of

'the canonical New York pop artists.'

OK, this is like...

-Oh, no, that's a little early.

-That's too soon, much too soon.

There it is.

'He arrived in the city in 1956,'

and quickly became an influential figure

in the downtown avant-garde performance art movement

known as the happenings.

His theatrical installation The Street was inspired

by the nightmarish experience of living in a modern metropolis.

He played a person going mad under the conditions.

But in the early '60s,

the tone of Oldenburg's work changed dramatically.

Modern life wasn't just scary - it was absurd.

-What's that? A steak, is it?

-Ah, I think it's a slice of ham...

and that's mashed potatoes.

So, was there meant to be quite a comical aspect to this,

-when people...?

-Well, don't you think that hamburgers are comical?

I mean, I didn't do that.

The guy who invented hamburgers probably did that.

To put the two of them together, that's pretty comical too.

Oldenburg began creating enormous, floppy versions of

everyday objects.

His cartoonish, soft sculptures are stripped of their function,

and surprisingly human.

Do you remember what you found at the time

-so exciting about these big, striking forms?

-I don't know.

I was just, maybe, I'm a child, you know? I want to create beauty.

I want to create form, you know?

-Under circumstances that are very difficult, and...

-So is that...

Pop art was then a challenge for the artist?

I think it's a challenge, yeah.

I always wanted to change things and make it into my own.

In 1963, exhausted by the chaos of New York,

Oldenburg headed west to Los Angeles.

His trip would prove transformative.

He began experimenting by taking his sculptures outdoors.

And here's the ice cream cone. It's on top of a Volkswagen.

I met Dennis Hopper out there and we would take this ice cream cone

and we'd place it in different spots in Los Angeles -

for example, on the runway of the airport or things like that.

Returning from LA, Oldenburg began to

observe the city from different perspectives.

He started playing with the idea of scale,

taking small objects and making them colossal.

The city became a sort of studio -

a playroom, if you like - that he could fill with toys.

A teddy bear in Central Park,

a melting ice lolly in Park Avenue.

Initially, these ideas were just fantasy - completely unfeasible -

but in 1969, he was approached by a committee of students

from Yale University who wanted to commemorate

the institution's first intake of female undergraduates.

Alluding to feminism as well as the Vietnam War, Oldenburg designed

a moving lecture podium - a towering lipstick aboard a military tank.

If someone wanted to give a lecture or a speech,

they would step up here, and there's...

There would be a device here that you put pull and push,

and pull and push, and you would gradually pump up this central part.

So, the second stage of this would be up like this,

and then when you got to the final stage, the thing would become erect.

You'd have an erect lipstick?

Yes, you would have an erect lipstick,

and you were giving your speech and you have to pay attention,

because if you don't push this thing back and forth,

it's going to start going down again.

It's just quite lewd, this rampant, flailing, tongue-like, erect,

-phallic lipstick.

-Oh, my God, yes. LAUGHTER

Is this...?

Are all lipsticks like that?

Well, not ones that I've really seen before, but...

This isn't a very particularly male-friendly piece, is it?

No, it isn't.

The guy has to work really hard to get that lipstick up.

And even then, it's going to quickly start wilting.

Yeah, and it starts wilting, yeah.

After the lipstick came a series of 43 large-scale projects,

created by Oldenburg in partnership with his wife, Coosje van Bruggen.

Full of mischief,

these sculptures distort the scale of the surrounding landscape,

and remind us of one of pop's greatest

but often overlooked legacies - humour.

A far cry from some earlier, po-faced modern art,

these utopian projects are witty, joyous, fun.

Springing up in cities all over the world, from Paris to Philadelphia,

Tokyo to Barcelona,

and of course, the city that proved

so inspirational in the first place -

Los Angeles.

Arriving from the dark, cramped confines

of New York's high-rise streets,

artists in the '60s found Los Angeles

to be a place of freedom and possibility.

With its open roads and fresh sea breeze,

it is a city of spaciousness and adventure,

and it proved a Mecca for the '60s pop generation.

MUSIC: Puff, The Magic Dragon by Peter, Paul and Mary

Famously, it inspired David Hockney's pop art fantasies

of the LA paradise.

It is, frankly, hard to imagine a city more in sync

with the spirit of pop art than Los Angeles

and, in the '60s, it was already expanding

into this sprawling, jumbled, hedonistic megalopolis

that it is today.

100 suburbs in search of a city, as someone once wittily put it,

basking beneath these palm trees and eternal sunshine

and dreaming, all of them, of the big time.

If the artists of New York

were obsessed with billboards and consumer life,

out West they painted hot chicks and fast cars.

And the West Coast pop scene was dismissed as too regional,

too parochial, too concerned with local subcultures and fads.

In the case of these trite, tasteless nudes by Mel Ramos,

maybe the critics had a point,

but one man inspired by LA's car culture would become, after Warhol,

the most influential American artist of the past half-century.

A vision of horizons and vanishing points,

America as seen by Ed Ruscha

is viewed through the windscreen of a car,

imbued with the romance of Route 66

and the rolling freedom of the open road.

And Ruscha dramatised one of pop's most important themes -

America's mythic sense of itself.

In the early '60s, Ruscha was the matinee idol of pop.

But, back in 1956, he was still a small-town boy

from America's Bible Belt,

nurturing hopes of becoming a commercial artist.

His native Oklahoma was stifling and claustrophobic.

I knew I wanted to travel,

leave Oklahoma...

..and go to an art school out here.

Why, particularly?

LA sounded better to me.

It just had more flavour to it,

more swank or something to it

that I may have been missing at the time.

So, aged 18, Ruscha set off on Route 66 for art school.

It was one of many subsequent road trips.

I used to hitchhike back and forth between California and Oklahoma,

where I grew up, and, as I was going along,

I would photograph gas stations.

I like the idea of sort of an on-the-road trip

documenting the whole thing from the view of gas stations.

So this is one of the very first...

-Well, the first, Ed Ruscha artist book.

-Yeah.

-And this is called, as the cover says, 26 Gasoline Stations.

-Right.

How much were you thinking about Duchamp?

Was he important as an influence at this point,

because you could see each individual gas station

as a sort of version of one of his readymades?

I could, and, in a sense, you might say, "Well, they are readymades."

I am glorifying each one of these things,

calling attention to something that most people might say

doesn't need calling attention to.

In a sense, Ruscha's books are conceptual artworks

and the paintings they inspired lead us into a surreal new realm.

Ordinary gas stations are dramatically lit with spotlights.

The Hollywood sign appears like a hero on the horizon.

Ruscha is visualising the dream factory of modern America,

how America manufactures not only its consumer products

but also its very sense of self.

Yet Ruscha's attitude to his homeland

is neither straightforwardly celebratory,

nor downright critical,

and that's the crux which animates all of his work.

At times, his paintings seem satirical,

setting ablaze the values of wealthy, corporate America

in all its depressing standardisation.

I did another painting of a restaurant here in town

called Norm's.

A critic comes along and says, "Oh, I see. Norms and standards, huh?

"Is that what he's after?"

Yeah, and it surprised me.

It can't have surprised you! Did it?

It surprised me, yeah, because that wasn't in my line of thinking.

You're kidding!

So, when you hear that, do you sort of think

it's nonsense to impose that sort of idea onto the artwork?

No, no, no, not nonsense at all.

It's coming from somebody else.

That's what Duchamp said.

To begin with, I think it was that, you know,

making the art is one thing,

and then interpreting it, it takes a viewer to add to it.

I mean, that's called... What? Backdoor influence.

Right.

Also, I felt like it takes almost somebody from a foreign country

to come to America to really see America.

How does that position you, then, in terms of coming from Oklahoma?

It makes me an outsider, doesn't it?

Or an insider or something.

But I felt like, you know,

the glory of America is somehow

hinted at in some of these works.

You know, I don't intentionally want to insert my patriotism into anything

but sometimes it just happens.

I'm really surprised to hear you talk about patriotism.

I don't think I've ever used that word.

-No! This is an exclusive.

-Yeah.

Ed Ruscha - patriot!

So these are works on paper that I do with pastel and acrylic.

I could be accused of being

a linguistic kleptomaniac.

Ruscha's stark, severe images are like epitaphs on a gravestone,

a final statement recording the soul of the American century.

Like the best pop art, Ruscha's work reflects the pride of a nation

on the march towards prosperity.

Often, it crackles with the wisecracking, tough guy attitude

which was such an essential part of America's self-image.

So it might seem surprising that the original explorers

on the frontier of popular culture

weren't American at all.

Ladies and gentlemen,

presenting her royal majesty.

# There she goes

# Her royal majesty

# She's the queen that broke my heart... #

I think that America would have been much more comfortable

if there hadn't been British pop art

and so it kind of just ignored it.

# Her royal majesty. #

In fact, pop art was invented, not in America at the start of the '60s,

but ten years earlier in Britain.

That drizzle-drenched kingdom of politeness and understatement

which, in the wake of the Second World War,

remained a bleak realm of austerity and rationing.

MUSIC: Here In My Heart by Al Martino

And, here, a group of young artists and intellectuals

dreamt about a land of plenty

that they knew existed on the other side of the Atlantic.

In 1952, they started an unofficial think tank,

calling themselves the Independent Group,

hungering after American culture

and feasting their eyes on ads for luscious food and miracle appliances

which were incorporated into these colleges

that Eduardo Paolozzi made in his scrapbooks.

The Independent Group believed that they could use imagery like this

to transform British culture

and build a new kind of society where everyone was equal.

Oxford Street passers-by halt to admire,

or maybe that's carrying it too far, anyway, they halt.

Some are stunned, others merely surprised,

by this modern-art conception of a nude in concrete.

For young British artists in the '50s,

the world of modern art was po-faced and stuck up,

protected by self-appointed guardians of high culture

who weren't interested in the masses but only the privileged few.

Why shouldn't a pop singer be as valid as a symphony

or a comic strip equal to a novel?

These were some of the burning questions

on the agenda of the Independent Group.

Nigel Henderson - photographer.

Alison Smithson - architect.

Eduardo Paolozzi - artist.

And Peter Smithson - architect.

The sparkiest voices of their generation,

and one of their number was art historian Mary Banham.

At 94, she's almost the last surviving member.

I mean, you know, you and these peers

are credited as the inventors pop art.

Yes.

-Is that how you see yourself, then?

-Pioneers.

-Yeah.

-Absolutely.

Every inch of it.

-We all had very different ideas, some of which led to fist fights.

-No.

-You might say.

-So it was unruly? It could be?

-Oh, not half.

We were all young and determined to put forward our ideas.

And, until the group disbanded in 1955,

ideas alone formed the basis of their activity.

The Independent Group didn't actually make much art.

Instead, they were interested in exchanging theories

about the nature of popular culture.

But, the following year, several members took part

in a landmark collaborative exhibition.

Incorporating film posters, sci-fi and fast food,

their vision of popular culture was presented to the public

for the first time.

Anyone who thinks abstract artists are too abstract

should drop in at the Whitechapel Art Gallery,

where there's an exhibition devoted to collaboration

between architects, painters and sculptors.

The various artists drew upon all sorts of imagery

to explore the world of the future.

But one installation was distinctly pop,

that of Group 2,

which included the far-sighted British pop artist Richard Hamilton.

All right, we're looking.

All right, we're thinking.

And think is exactly what Hamilton wanted everyone to do.

But, for years, his brainy take on pop art was neglected.

For most of his life, Richard Hamilton was relatively undervalued,

but I think he really deserves to be as well-known

as some of the greats of 20th-century British art

like Francis Bacon or Henry Moore.

Inside the Tate's vaults is proof of Hamilton's importance.

Designed as a poster for This Is Tomorrow, the collage

Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?

has become one of pop art's most celebrated early works.

This later reproduction shows us exactly why.

The setting is a swish, modern living room

which Hamilton turns into

a tongue-in-cheek consumerist paradise,

lampooning the seductive visual strategies of American advertising,

which provided its various sources.

The really astonishing thing about this small picture

is that, even though the original collage was created in 1956,

long before pop art even had a name,

it provides a kind of prescient index

of the movement's chief subjects and motifs,

all of the things that other artists like Roy Lichtenstein

would later pick up.

And dominating everything is this prominent bodybuilder

wearing white trunks.

In his right hand, in place of a dumbbell,

he's holding a very suggestive, phallic,

red, cellophane-wrapped lollipop bearing the brand name Tootsie Pop

and, because of that detail,

this work is often considered the first genuinely pop work of pop art,

perhaps even the movement's manifesto.

So this small, perhaps, at first, underwhelming image,

has to be, actually, one of the most inventive and prophetic pictures

in the history of 20th-century British art.

Like his hero Marcel Duchamp,

Hamilton made work that was both playful and brainy.

He presents elements of popular culture like pieces of a puzzle

for the viewer to solve.

And that's exactly why Hamilton has been overlooked.

He and the Independent Group were simply too clever by half.

The early British pop artists never produced anything

as immediately satisfying as the bold visual statements

of Warhol or Lichtenstein.

Ultimately, they were intellectuals

viewing consumer culture from a position of critical detachment.

But the next generation of British artists,

they had a very different attitude towards popular culture,

one that was much more straightforward and unconflicted,

celebratory.

In short, they were fans.

MUSIC: Goodbye Cruel World by James Darren

# Goodbye cruel world

# Goodbye cruel world

# Oh, goodbye cruel world

# I'm off to join the circus... #

The art of Peter Blake is a riot of working-class entertainment.

The pleasures of rock music, the fairground, the circus.

# Turned my whole world upside down... #

Visiting Blake's studio is like stepping into a bygone age.

A nostalgic soul, he's immersed in yesteryear's popular culture.

It's all folk art, so it's fairground...

-Like this sort of thing. Carousel horses.

-Carousels. Yeah.

-And tattoo.

-I was just looking at these slabs of wooden meat

and wondering what they were.

-They're props. They're pantomime props.

-They're brilliant, yeah.

# Well, the joke's on me

# I'm off to join the circus

# Oh, Mr Barnum, save a place for me

# Shoot me out of a cannon

# I don't care... #

Blake channelled the populist, egalitarian spirit

of English folk art

and repurposed it for the modern age.

In doing so, he paved the way for other young artists

to break down the division between high and low culture

by foregrounding his own personal hobbies, interests and experiences.

In his painting Self-portrait With Badges,

Blake presents himself as an American teenager

wearing home-made jeans fashioned from overalls.

In 1961, this seemed wilfully eccentric.

The idea of an adult covered with a lot of badges didn't exist.

It seemed quite childlike, really.

-It was a childlike thing to have lots of badges.

-Absolutely.

I was becoming a child again. Yeah. Yeah.

Through popular culture, Blake found a way of making sense of his past,

the loss of his childish innocence in the Second World War

when, at the age of just seven, he was evacuated to the countryside

to the austere household of a woman called Mrs Lofts.

Every Sunday, we went to the morning service,

Sunday school and the evening service

and then, in the evening,

I suppose after the service, she'd send my sister and I out for a walk

just to get rid of us,

and, one day, I thought, "This is awful, I'm committing suicide."

And I tried to strangle myself

and, as a seven-year-old kid, you can't,

-so, yeah, it was pretty rough.

-That's dreadful.

-You were quite damaged by this?

-Yeah. I realised I was.

In his wistful autobiographical works

from the early part of his career,

Blake uses popular culture to evoke his stolen childhood.

MUSIC: Mr Sandman by The Chordettes

-# I'm so alone

-Bum-bum-bum-bum

-# Don't have nobody to call my own

-Bum-bum-bum-bum... #

The figures, full of yearning, are based on members of his own family.

# And tell him that his lonesome nights are over... #

These paintings simply reveal Blake's own childhood hobbies

and, most important of all, his passion for music.

-So is this your sort of principle working space, then?

-Yeah.

But this is still part of your collections of various things?

Well, when LPs went out of favour, I kept mine.

-Can we have a leaf through and have a look?

-Yeah, I mean...

Charlie Parker.

These just happen to be what's on the top, so Charlie Parker, Dave Brubeck.

To Blake, pop music is more than just a theme of his work.

Back in the '50s, it helped him define his entire artistic approach.

Lawrence Alloway, who was an English critic,

was having a dinner party one night

and we were talking about what I was trying to do and I said,

"I'm trying to make an art that works on the same level as music,

"so that, if somebody listens to an Elvis Presley record,

"they could look at a picture by me of Elvis on the same level,"

and he said, "What? A kind of pop art?"

What? So you were there at the birth of...

Not only were there, you inspired the birth of the term.

Well, I claim I do.

During a career spanning more than 50 years,

Blake defined how we see many of our greatest musical heroes.

His most famous pop creation, made with the artist Jann Haworth,

transformed The Beatles from boy band to legend.

But it's a painting he began in 1960

that first encapsulates his pop ethos.

MUSIC: Got a Girl by The Four Preps

# Oh, well, I've got a girl What a girl

# I don't know what to do... #

Got A Girl is based on a song by The Four Preps

and it contains an actual record.

The imagery of the painting acts out the lyrics of the song.

# Yeah, there was Fabian

# Avalon

# Ricky Nelson too, yeah, yeah, yeah

# Bobby Rydell and I know darn well

# Presley's in there too... #

We could even think of the entire composition

as a rudimentary precursor to the music video.

Blake's classic pop pictures broadcast a liberating message

to younger British painters -

no subject on earth was off-limits.

And, as he approached 30, Blake, the so-called godfather of British pop,

found himself at the forefront of a dynamic new scene.

# I guess I might have known... #

Six years after he'd enrolled there,

the Royal College of Art

welcomed a blazingly talented intake of students.

# Presley's in there too... #

'59 was that extraordinary year,

that was Hockney, Allen Jones,

Boshier, Pete Phillips,

Pauline Boty.

Ken Russell's documentary film Pop Goes the Easel

was broadcast on the BBC in 1962,

launching the exciting new pop art movement to the nation.

Street-smart and hip,

these young artists grew up with rock music and fashion

and they depicted celebrity, the space race and consumer products

with the same ease as their American counterparts,

but the British approach was more painterly, less aggressive

and sometimes more complicated.

Still, one thing they did share with the Americans

was a knack for provocation.

The initial reaction they elicited was one of horror.

The artist Allen Jones proved particularly shocking.

His tutors at the Royal College expelled him as an example.

Russell Spears said, "Oh, you're going to be a decorator.

That's quite a low blow, really, isn't it, for any aspiring painter?

-You don't really want to be a decorator.

-Yeah, I was amused.

I was staggered that he should say that, actually,

but, on the other hand, here we are

50-something years later

and I've remembered it.

In 1961, the year he should have graduated from the Royal College,

Jones helped his friend, the artist Peter Phillips,

to organise the prestigious student exhibition Young Contemporaries.

When the committee went home, Peter and I had to lock up and so on

and we wandered around looking at the show,

and we looked at each other and just said,

"This just looks like a sketch club,"

and so we just took down everything off the walls

and put all the work that we liked on one wall, basically,

and so the Hockneys and the Boshiers and my work and so on

were somehow hung as a cohesive group

and it's seen as the first manifestation of pop art,

as it subsequently was called.

Whatever the origins of pop art, one thing's for sure -

by the end of the '60s,

the movement would extend far beyond the realm of the art gallery

and into society at large.

Allen Jones even received a phone call

from the director Stanley Kubrick,

who wanted to borrow his sculptures for his latest film

for free.

He did point out to me how famous he was,

that I would get a lot of coverage,

and I said, "Yes, but I'm not a set designer."

I said, "If you can get me a show in the Louvre, I'll do it."

Jones never did get that show at the Louvre,

but he did give Kubrick his blessing to copy his work

for A Clockwork Orange,

so Kubrick animated one of the most controversial films

of the 20th century

by plundering the look of Jones's kinky sculptures.

The movement that had raided popular culture was now its fodder.

Pop art had become a look.

Straddling the worlds of fashion, design and music,

and capable of crossing continents.

It isn't just this single story, this Anglo-American narrative.

There were different things happening in Germany,

in France, across Europe, elsewhere in the world,

and, even if they can't be narrowly defined as pop,

the kind of pop that Warhol, Lichtenstein

and his contemporaries created,

they're part of a wider spirit

that I think it's perfectly legitimate to think of

as a part of pop art.

The old stories about pop art are too one-sided.

Lichtenstein may have parodied

the media's infatuation with blonde bombshells

but other pop artists seem to reflect sexist stereotypes

without much thought.

But there were female pop artists

who attacked the chauvinism of popular culture

and were then sidelined for years.

One of them has lived here at the Chelsea Hotel since the '60s

and it's only recently that Nicola L has been embraced as a pop artist.

KNOCK ON DOOR

-Oh! Hello.

-Nicola, hello.

-Alastair.

-Yes. Good to meet you.

-If it's all right... The zip's down here.

-Yes.

Oh, you know already. That's great.

What's happening here?

It's a kind of construction-destruction.

-Ah, you know...

-It's like a warzone.

Is this sculpture or furniture?

Is it pop or surrealism?

In a playful fashion, Nicola L objectifies women, literally.

The women on offer here are very different

from the pin-ups of classic pop

but they still fizz with all its ironic wit.

This is the ironing table

and it is a woman.

A woman. Like quite a lot of your furniture, it's a woman.

Is this a woman's giant green foot?

-Can I sit on it?

-Yes, please.

-I'd love to see you on it.

-So, this is...

Right. I mean, this is...

-It's a work of art as well as a piece of furniture.

-Yes.

-Well, it is very comfortable.

-Yes.

I've got to ask you about this. Do you actually use this for real?

Oh, yes. This is for my cheques.

-You keep things in the drawers?

-Yes.

-Look at the mouth!

This is my credit card. This is whatever.

You know, it is on wheels. You can dance with it if you want.

-Yeah?

-That's amazing.

Nicola L made this furniture when she arrived in New York in 1967.

It was a radical departure from her early work in Paris.

There, she had studied as a painter

and struggled for visibility in the macho art scene.

My name was Nicola without S, at the school of Beaux-Arts in Paris,

so I put an S on my name, Nicolas, so it seemed a guy, you know?

-And it worked?

-It works.

So the guy, he came and looked and said, "You are a girl," you know,

completely furious.

I could see he was really disappointed.

Like most art students at the start of the '60s,

Nicola first made abstract paintings.

I had the feeling that nobody was really looking at my work

and, one day, I made four...

One, two, three, four, five robes.

-Oh, I see. For the head and the limbs.

-And I went inside.

-Right. Great.

-Yeah.

So you actually put your whole legs and feet...

I try to do it.

We have to be...

-So, suddenly, I was asking them to be inside the painting.

-Yeah, right!

You know?

And, well...

MUSIC: Mellow Yellow by Donovan

Nicola's eccentric paintings became a series of work,

called The Penetrables.

The most striking example is Same Skin For Everyone,

a red coat for 11 people

which Nicola has carried around the world in a suitcase.

In every new city, she invites passers-by to join her

in putting on the coat.

Helping each other inside,

the strangers become joined by a common skin

and walk together.

It's often seen as a plea for tolerance

and a protest against racism.

-They're saying that you're a pop artist.

-Yeah, yeah.

Whereas, in most of the histories of pop,

you're not explicitly there.

Suddenly, you know... First, you have to have a long life

if you are a woman, you know?

It's easier to be a man in... for my generation, you know.

Nicola wasn't alone.

Pop art included several important female artists who,

like her, were subsequently ignored.

Artists like Rosalyn Drexler, Pauline Boty,

Marisol, and Evelyn Axell.

Their work had a more explicit,

passionately-political quality than the ironic, cool carapace

of classic pop, and the artists were in good company.

In the '60s and '70s, new strands of pop art emerged, harnessing

pop's knack for stylishly recycling the strategies of advertising.

Younger artists began to use pop's powers of persuasion

to sell a very different kind of product - radical change.

SIREN BLARES

In 1968, a sexual, social and political revolution

convulsed France.

SHOUTING

What started out as an isolated student protest

quickly turned into all-out war...

..with 10 million people on strike,

raging against working conditions, unemployment

and France's stifling conservative society.

Within days of the protests,

mysterious posters started emerging all over Paris...

..their inciendary slogans wittily incited revolution.

Every morning, new designs appeared in their hundreds.

The posters were the work of Atelier Populaire,

or the people's studio, a collective of anonymous artists,

and together they worked with the protesters to create

thousands of posters in their very own propaganda production line

and everything about the posters - the method of the production,

their spirit, the visual language - it all borrowed heavily from pop.

French pop art wasn't especially new.

By the end of the '50s, artists were already making work

that drew heavily upon popular culture.

But it wasn't until 1968 that pop art finally connected

with workers on the street.

In May '68, French artists returning to Paris to support the students

came here to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts,

where the Atelier Populaire had occupied

the lithographic department.

When was the last time that you were here?

-45 years ago.

-Really?

'In 1968, Gerard Fromanger was a member of Atelier Populaire,

'and an anonymous spokesman for the group.'

Even the power tried to get us.

In the beginning, Fromanger and his friends planned

to design prints to raise money for the students.

-This is the first one we did here... on this machine.

-Really?

This one, usines... factory, university, union.

Because all the day long before...

..the cry in the street, "Usines, universite, union!

"Usines, universite, union!" So we did!

LA MARSEILLAISE PLAYS

As soon as the posters were produced,

they were pasted on the walls...

..transformed from prints into weapons

in the service of the struggle.

The only problem was

lithographic printing was labour-intensive and slow.

-Everything with hand, so 30 in one night.

-That's hard.

-Oh, very hard.

But one of the artists had just returned from New York where

he'd become well acquainted with Warhol and his silkscreen process.

This commercial technique would allow the Atelier to produce

hundreds of posters every night

and react immediately to unfolding events.

-This was a de Gaulle quote. He said this thing.

-It was a response.

-Quickly.

-Quickly. Yes.

-How fast are we talking?

-After 10 hours...

..it was ready and on the walls.

Although the Atelier Populaire was active

for just the few weeks of the riots,

its impact reveals the far-reaching power of pop art as a mode,

its ability to revolutionise people on the streets

as much as visitors to the art gallery.

No other modern art movement has been so widely accessible.

And in other parts of the world, from South America to Iran,

artists used the language of pop art for politically subversive ends.

Neglected for years, the work of international pop artists

has recently been gaining acclaim

and will now be celebrated in Tate Modern's upcoming

exhibition of global pop art - The World Goes Pop.

Yet this extraordinary explosion happened at the very moment

when many were proclaiming pop art's demise.

In New York City, on 3rd June 1968,

Warhol's factory received an uninvited guest -

Valerie Solanas,

actress and founding member of SCUM,

the Society for Cutting Up Men.

She had a grudge against Warhol and was out for revenge.

Warhol didn't stand a chance.

Solanis pulled out a gun and fired.

Miraculously, after six hours on the operating table,

he did pull through, but the survival

of the movement that he'd helped to create was in the balance.

That year, the New York Times announced that pop art was dead,

but even though Warhol's shooting is often used to mark

the end of classic pop, in fact, like Warhol, pop art would live on.

After the shooting, Warhol remained as prolific as ever.

In total, he produced 10,000 paintings,

one for every day of his life.

-I'm a commercial person.

-Why?

-Well, I've got a lot of mouths to feed.

Got to bring home the bacon.

By the '70s, he was making 2 million a year,

purely from the sale of commissioned portraits.

I paint anybody - anybody that asks me.

How do you choose to paint somebody, just because they ask?

Er, yeah, that's the only way.

For 40,000, anyone could have a Warhol of their own,

based on a quick Polaroid snap.

In 1975, Warhol declared himself a business artist,

dedicated to the art of making money.

Pop might have lived on, but to its many critics it had sold out.

And the long shadow of Warhol's influence continued

most obviously in the work

of the world's most expensive living artist, Jeff Koons,

whose kitsch sculptures furthered pop's use of bad taste

to shock the art world.

But artists did continue using

the sharp, satirical edge of pop art...

..and in the last place you'd expect - behind the Iron Curtain,

where from the beginning of the '70s

pop became a means of political subversion.

Inspired by Western pop art, artists began to explore the parallels

between the imagery of advertising and the imagery of propaganda.

Just as advertising was trying to sell a product,

propaganda was trying to sell a political system.

The phenomenon arose in the Soviet Union,

in a movement known as Sots Art, but it had much greater impact

in China where pop still underpins contemporary art.

A movement known as Political Pop emerged in 1989

as China embraced economic reform and opened its doors to the West.

It coincided with the tragic events of Tiananmen Square.

That suddenly changed the entire mood of the nation.

Basically, the cultural world was very quiet.

Everything went underground and Political Pop,

as a new form of art, emerged during this era.

It was very much an art form that captured the shift

from one end of the Cold War to the other side.

Young, politically disaffected artists lampooned the awkward

relationship between the ideals of communism

and the introduction of consumer goods.

Risking censorship and arrest, artists like Wang Guangyi

and Yu Youhan relied on pastiche, irony

and playfulness to communicate the state of a nation

on the brink of enormous political and economic change.

Parodying Western brands and slogans,

these artists imagined the kind of future that capitalism could bring,

and that future has come to pass in a nation that has become

the world's largest and fastest-growing economy.

It may sound a little strange,

but coming to China today reveals quite a lot, I think,

about the mind-set that produced pop art in mid-century America.

Just as America in the '40s and '50s

was rampantly expanding as a nation, so China over the past two decades

has transformed itself with astonishing speed.

Look at that skyline.

This is a glittering and self-confident

freshly-manufactured world,

and Chinese artists who wanted to come to terms

with this profound shift in their society, they became

obsessed with a particular product of the West - pop art.

Several decades after its creation,

pop had become the go-to style for a nation on the up.

If you think of China in the last 25 years, the whole material world

of China, the whole visual world, is totally transformed.

Everything is new and just made,

so dealing with this newly manufactured world

is certainly something that everybody has to deal with,

so, in this sense, I think pop sensibility is

embedded in the Chinese consciousness and one has to come to deal with it.

For the generation of artists who grew up during China's miracle boom,

21st-century mass media culture is a turbo-charged mix

of commercial imagery and consumer desire...

..video games and the furious buzz of a 24-hour online society.

And it's the internet that inspires superstar Chinese artist Xu Zhen...

..one of the leading and most controversial artists

of his generation...

..China's answer to Andy Warhol

and a man who's reinventing pop for the 21st century.