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(b Madrid, 1942).

Spanish painter, sculptor and printmaker. After studying at the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes in Madrid he came under the influence of Pop art during a stay in London in 1965. On settling again in Madrid in that year he began to concentrate on images of movement, as in the screenprint Story of the Man Who Falls I, for which he was awarded a prize at the Kraków Biennale in 1966. He continued to explore movement through serial forms and stereotyped images in plexiglass constructions such as the Changeable Movement series (1967) and from 1968 used computers as part of this process. These interests led to sculptures and paintings titled Transformable Movements, which he presented in association with aleatoric music.

Alexanco became increasingly involved with performance and collaborated with the Spanish composer Luis de Pablo (b 1930) on Soledad interrumpida (1971) and Historia natural...

(b São Paulo, 1935; d São Paulo, 2015).

Brazilian painter and printmaker. After studying engraving in São Paulo, he moved to New York in 1959 to complete his studies at the Pratt Graphic Center, where his contact with international Pop art merged with his own interest in Brazilian popular imagery, for example in the portfolio of woodcuts Mine and Yours (1967). Immediately afterwards he began painting ambiguous and ironic still lifes collectively titled Brasíliana, which use bananas as symbols of underdevelopment and exploitation, for example BR-1 SP (1970; São Paulo, Pin. Estado) and Bananas (1971; Washington, DC, Mus. Mod. A. Latin America). In 1971 he won a trip abroad in the National Salon of Modern Art (Rio de Janeiro), which took him again to New York between 1972 and 1973. On his return to São Paulo he began the series Battlegrounds, in which he submitted the previously reclining bananas to slashing, torture, and putrefaction. Subsequently, shapes were reorganized into configurations of an undramatic Surrealism, playful, colorful, tumescent, and as firmly rooted as ever in his native Brazil and Latin America....

(b Washington, DC, Dec 26, 1924; d in Albany, NY, Feb 9, 2013).

American sculptor and painter . He studied art in 1949–50 under Amédée Ozenfant in New York. During the 1950s he designed and made furniture in New York, but after a fire that destroyed most of the contents of his shop in 1958 he turned again to art, initially painting abstract pictures derived from memories of the New Mexican landscape.

Artschwager continued to produce furniture and, after a commission to make altars for ships in 1960, had the idea of producing sculptures that mimicked actual objects while simultaneously betraying their identity as artistic illusions. At first these included objets trouvés made of wood, overpainted with acrylic in an exaggerated wood-grain pattern (e.g. Table and Chair, 1962–3; New York, Paula Cooper priv. col., see 1988–9 exh. cat., p. 49), but he soon developed more abstract or geometrical versions of such objects formed from a veneer of formica on wood (e.g. Table and Chair...

(b Dodge City, KA, June 7, 1934).

American painter. He studied at City College, Los Angeles (1953–5), California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, CA (1955–6) and Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles (1956–7). Between 1961 and 1973 he lectured at various art colleges. After initially studying ceramics, Bengston began to concentrate on painting in 1956 and participated in the first group show at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1957, which put him at the centre the region’s new avant-garde, alongside such figures as Ed Kienholtz and Ed Moses. He is best known for the elegiac, Dada-esque tone of his work in the 1960s, when he was heavily influenced by the motorbike and car culture of Southern California, from which he drew motifs such as chevrons, Draculas and love hearts. Mr. Britt (1960; see 1988 exh. cat, pl. 3) is typical in its placement of sergeant stripes in a square in the centre, surrounded by a flat covering of forest green. ...

(b Dartford, Kent, June 25, 1932).

English painter, printmaker and sculptor. He studied at Gravesend Technical College and School of Art from 1946 to 1951, and from 1953 at the Royal College of Art, London, where he was awarded a First-Class Diploma in 1956. He then travelled through Europe for a year on a Leverhulme Research Award to study the popular and folk art that had already served him as a source of inspiration. While still a student Blake began producing paintings that openly testified to his love of popular entertainment and the ephemera of modern life, for example Children Reading Comics (1954; Carlisle, Mus. & A.G.), and which were phrased in a faux-naïf style that owed something to the example of American realist painters such as Ben Shahn. In these works Blake displayed his nostalgia for dying traditions not only by his preference for circus imagery but also by artificially weathering the irregular wooden panels on which he was then painting. His respect for fairground art, barge painting, tattooing, commercial art, illustration and other forms of image-making rooted in folkloric traditions led him to produce some of the first works to which the term ...

(b Portsmouth, June 19, 1937).

English painter, sculptor, photographer and printmaker. He studied painting and lithography at Yeovil School of Art in Somerset (1953–7), Guildford College of Art (1957–9) and the Royal College of Art, London (1959–62), where he was one of the students associated with Pop art. Like R. B. Kitaj and David Hockney, Boshier juxtaposed contrasting styles within his paintings, but he favoured topical subject-matter such as the space race, political events and the Americanization of Europe. The satirical edge of such paintings as Identi-kit Man (1962; London, Tate), which pictured the threat posed by advertising to individual identity, was prompted by his reading of Marshall McLuhan, Vance Packard and other commentators. In the autumn of 1962 Boshier went to India on a one-year scholarship, producing paintings based on Indian symbolism (accidentally destr.). Returning to England he adopted a hard-edged geometric style, often using shaped canvases, abandoning overt figuration but continuing to allude through form to architectural structures and to the grid plans of cities....

(b Carshalton, Surrey, Mar 6, 1938; d London, July 1, 1966).

English painter and collagist. She studied stained glass at Wimbledon School of Art (1954–8), and at the Royal College of Art, London (1959–61). At the Royal College she continued to work with stained glass whilst privately making Surrealist-influenced collages and abstract paintings. Painting became the focus of her practice after finishing college, and in 1961 she exhibited alongside artists such as Peter Blake and two other painters in one of the first exhibitions of British Pop Art (London, AIA Gal.). Boty became a well-known personality in London during the 1960s, attracting attention for her striking looks and minor roles in television drama as well as through her reputation as a painter. In 1962 she and her eclectic collages were featured in Ken Russell’s BBC television film documenting British Pop, Pop Goes the Easel. By 1963 she had evolved a Pop vocabulary in her paintings using images of celebrities such as Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe with a celebratory and humorous approach to female sexuality. In ...

(b Leicester, April 5, 1944).

English painter and printmaker. From 1962 to 1967 he studied at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne under Richard Hamilton, also benefiting from contact with visiting tutors such as Pop artists Richard Smith (for whom he later worked as an assistant), Joe Tilson and Eduardo Paolozzi. As a student at the University of Reading from 1967 to 1969, Buckley began to present his paintings as substantial physical objects, constructed in frequently eccentric shapes and then decorated. The clues to subject-matter were often indicated in the titles, which could be allusions to places, for example Rannoch (1971; AC Eng); to the techniques used, as in Cut, Burnt and Tied (1971; London, Brit. Council); or to historic styles, such as Cubism, as in Head of a Young Girl No. 1 (1974; Liverpool, Walker A.G.). Often Buckley drew upon the everyday environment: in the early work by referring to crazy pavings, tartan patterns and prosaic interiors, and in the later work by alluding to more specific architectural details and by using cardboard tubing and plastic drainpipes as constructional elements. He not only painted with brushes on stretched canvas but also worked with improvised processes such as tearing, folding, stitching, stapling, patching, screwing together, nailing and weaving. Along with traditional artists’ materials, he used house paint, shoe polish, liquid linoleum, perspex, carpeting and old clothes. Often admired for the breadth of his reference to other 20th-century art, Buckley, like his friend Howard Hodgkin, used the abstraction of simple marks and bold design to convey specific moods and circumstances....

(b London, Jan 29, 1936; d London, Sept 29, 2005).

English painter and printmaker. He began his studies in 1956 at Chelsea School of Art, London, continuing at the Royal College of Art (1960–63), one year below the students identified as originators of Pop art. A reticent man, he remained wary of being identified with any movement but came to be associated with Pop art chiefly through his participation in the New Generation exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, in 1964.

In the early 1960s Caulfield’s painting was characterized by flat images of objects paired with angular geometric devices or isolated against unmodulated areas of colour. In Portrait of Juan Gris (1963; priv. col., see Livingstone, 1981 exh. cat., no. 5) Caulfield paid tribute to the Cubist painter, whose work, with that of other early modernists such as Léger and Magritte, set the terms for the stylization and formal rigour of his own still-lifes, landscapes and interiors. He adopted the anonymous technique of the sign painter, dispensing with visible brushwork and distracting detail and simplifying the representation of objects to a basic black outline in order to present ordinary images as emblems of a mysterious reality. He deliberately chose subjects that seemed hackneyed or ambiguous in time: not only traditional genres (e.g. ...

(b Buffalo, NY, June 16, 1930; d Dec 17, 1998).

American painter and printmaker. He studied painting in Mexico City from 1957 to 1959 with John Golding (b 1929) under the terms of the G.I. Bill. His reputation as a Pop artist was established by his first New York one-man exhibition in 1963 where he showed his first acrylic paintings of the American highway and industrial landscape, such as Highway U.S. 1 – No. 3 (1963; Richmond, VA Mus. F.A.). Such large-scale canvases visually transported the viewer through a time sequence, as if travelling along a highway, catching glimpses of trees, dividing lines, signs and route markers. In subsequent works D’Arcangelo continued to examine the American landscape both as directly experienced and in the form of generalized contemporary symbols. An essentially flat and impersonal style allowed him to suggest an illusionistic space without sacrificing the viewer’s consciousness of the picture plane. This ambiguity between real and fictive space is further enforced in works such as ...

(b Cincinnati, OH, June 6, 1935).

American painter, sculptor, printmaker, illustrator, performance artist, stage designer and poet. He studied art at the Cincinnati Arts Academy (1951–3) and later at the Boston Museum School and Ohio University (1954–7). In 1957 he married Nancy Minto and the following year they moved to New York. Dine’s first involvement with the art world was in his Happenings of 1959–60. These historic theatrical events, for example The Smiling Workman (performed at the Judson Gallery, New York, 1959), took place in chaotic, makeshift environments built by the artist–performer. During the same period he created his first assemblages, which incorporated found materials. Simultaneously he developed the method by which he produced his best known work—paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures that depict and expressively interpret common images and objects.

Clothing and domestic objects featured prominently in Dine’s paintings of the 1960s, with a range of favoured motifs including ties, shoes and bathroom items such as basins, showers and toothbrushes (e.g. ...

(b Cologne, Germany, 1969).

American mixed-media artist of German birth and Asian descent. Ezawa studied at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf (1990–94) before moving to San Francisco in 1994. He received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (1995) and an MFA from Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA (2003). Ezawa is not a photographer, but his work centers around photography; he has used a variety of media, from digital animations to paper collages and aquatint prints, to revisit some of the world’s most familiar, infamous and historically significant news photographs, television broadcasts and motion-picture stills (see The Simpson Verdict). All of Ezawa’s work utilizes the artist’s signature style of flat, simple renderings that are cartoonlike and also suggest the streamlined and colorful style of Pop artist Katz, Alex.

Ezawa’s project, The History of Photography Remix (2004–6), exemplifies his approach to exploring the power of photographs as a mirror of reality and yet also a force that can manipulate memories of events and people. The project consists of images appropriated from art history textbooks, such as American photographer Cindy Sherman’s ...

(b São Paulo, Dec 28, 1928; d Stockholm, Nov 8, 1976).

Swedish painter. Following a childhood spent in Brazil, he moved to Sweden in 1939. He studied archaeology and the history of art, specializing in pre-Columbian manuscripts, and he showed an interest in the theatre. In the early 1950s he worked as a journalist, wrote plays and poems and in 1952 began to paint his first composite pictures. In 1953 Fahlström published a manifesto, Hipy Papy Bthuthdth Thuthda Bthuthdy: Manifesto for Concrete Poetry (Stockholm), which manipulates language irrespective of the meanings of words. He saw an unexploited wealth, both sensual and intellectual, in its phonetic materials and in the distortions that occur when letters are transposed. In the following years he worked mainly on a large painting entitled Ade-Ledic-Nander II (oil, 1955–7; Stockholm, Mod. Mus.), where little hieroglyphic signs are arranged in major, antagonistic groups. Next, he appropriated images from such comic strips as Krazy Kat (for illustration see Comic-strip art...

(b Oklahoma City, OK, March 23, 1937).

American painter and sculptor. During the late 1950s he moved from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles and attended the Chouinard Art Institute (1959–61) with his childhood friend Ed Ruscha. He subsequently became associated with the emerging Pop art movement when his paintings of milk bottles appeared in Walter Hopps’s 1962 exhibition New Paintings of Common Objects at the Pasadena Art Museum.

Although Goode’s work has often been compared to that of such Pop artists as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, it shares little of their preoccupation with either the mass media or technological reproduction. In many respects, his paintings and sculptures have much more in common with the work of Jasper Johns than they do with advertisements and consumer objects. In particular, his work develops the tension between the object and the image that was so central to Johns’s flag and target paintings during the late 1950s. In his milk bottle paintings, for example, he positioned painted bottles in front of low-hung, nearly monochrome canvases to explore the dynamic between the painting as an illusion and a decorative backdrop. During the late 1960s, he also constructed a series of staircases that ran up the walls or into the corners of the gallery. These works made coy reference to the recession of pictorial space in perspectival painting (not to mention Marcel Duchamp’s ...

(b Euskirchen, April 22, 1924; d Cologne, April 5, 1987).

German collector and restorer. After World War II he trained as a restorer of paintings in Cologne, Munich and Vienna. He worked in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne from 1949 and took charge of the restoration department in 1963. He started his collection with paintings by Cologne painters such as Peter Abelen (1884–1962), Joseph Fassbender, Peter Herkenrath (1900–93) and Ludwig Egidius Ronig (1885–1959). Under the stimulus of avant-garde exhibitions in Cologne and Düsseldorf, a keen interest in current events in the world of art and his friendships with artists and gallery owners, Hahn widened the scope of his collection. His advice as a connoisseur of contemporary art was valued not only by his museum colleagues but also by collectors such as Peter Ludwig.

Hahn assembled a remarkably complete collection of works by many artists closely connected with Nouveau Réalisme, including Arman, Christo, César, Jean Tinguely, ...

(b London, Feb 24, 1922; d Sept 13, 2011).

English painter and printmaker. Three different strands of training and experience contributed to his early life and career after being taught briefly by Mark Gertler at Westminster Technical College in 1936: a traditional training at the Royal Academy Schools (1938–40, 1945–6), from which he was eventually expelled ‘for not profiting by the instruction given in the Painting School’; experience in commercial art at the Design Unit (1941–2) and at the record company EMI (1942–5); and an avant-garde, modernist-influenced training at the Slade School of Fine Art (1948–51). These prepared the ground for his subsequent exploration of the means by which received boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art could be eliminated, in order to examine the relationships between diverse forms of expression, styles and currents of taste normally considered mutually exclusive.

As early as 1948 James Joyce and Marcel Duchamp became major influences on his thinking, first in drawings illustrating ...

(b Bradford, July 9, 1937).

English painter, printmaker, photographer, and stage designer. Perhaps the most popular and versatile British artist of the 20th century, Hockney made apparent his facility as a draughtsman while studying at Bradford School of Art between 1953 and 1957, producing portraits and observations of his surroundings under the influence of the Euston Road School and of Stanley Spencer. From 1957 to 1959 he worked in hospitals as a conscientious objector to fulfil the requirements of national service. On beginning a three-year postgraduate course at the Royal College of Art, London, in 1959, he turned first to the discipline of drawing from life in two elaborate studies of a skeleton before working briefly in an abstract idiom inspired by the paintings of Alan Davie.

Encouraged by a fellow student, R. B. Kitaj, Hockney soon sought ways of reintegrating a personal subject-matter into his art while remaining faithful to his newly acquired modernism. He began tentatively by copying fragments of poems on to his paintings, encouraging a close scrutiny of the surface and creating a specific identity for the painted marks through the alliance of word and image. These cryptic messages soon gave way to open declarations in a series of paintings produced in ...

(b New Castle, IN, Sept 13, 1928).

American painter, sculptor, and printmaker. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago (1949–53), the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine (summer 1953) and Edinburgh University and Edinburgh College of Art (1953–4), before settling in New York in 1954. There in the late 1950s he began assembling wood sculptures from found materials, often stencilling painted words on to them, as in Moon (h. 1.98 m, 1960; New York, MOMA). He called these works Herms after the quadrangular, stone stelae guardian figures that served as signposts in crossroads in ancient Greece and Rome. Indiana called himself a ‘sign painter’ to suggest the humble origins of his artistic activity in the American work ethic and to indicate his fascination with the use of words in signs. Joining his interest in Americana with the formal and signifying elements of signs, he visualized the superficial and illusory American Dream in paintings characterized by flat bright colours and clearly defined contours influenced by the hard-edge paintings by friends such as Ellsworth Kelly and Jack Youngerman....

(b Neuilly-sur-Seine, nr Paris, Feb 22, 1939; d New York, Sept 4, 2008).

French painter, sculptor and printmaker. He briefly studied architecture in 1960 at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris but was self-taught as a painter. Sympathetic to Nouveau Réalisme but wishing to counter the lyricism of Art informel in the context of painting, he adopted a cool representational style, often using clichéd imagery. Such works brought him within the orbit of Pop art. Among his first paintings exhibited at the 2e Biennale de Paris (Paris, Mus. A. Mod. Ville Paris, 1961) next to an installation by Martial Raysse were visual puns on several vividly coloured compositions entitled Jeu de Jacquet (1961; see 1978 exh. cat.), a pun on his name and the game of backgammon, on which he based their formats. In 1962 he instituted a series of paintings entitled Camouflages, in which he superimposed a vulgar symbol on to a reproduction of a work of art: a Shell petrol pump on Botticelli’s Venus (...

(b Augusta, GA, May 15, 1930).

American painter, sculptor, and printmaker. With Robert Rauschenberg, he was one of the leading figures in the American Pop art movement, and he became particularly well known for his use of the imagery of targets, flags, maps, and other instantly recognizable subjects. Although he attended the University of South Carolina for over a year, and later briefly attended an art school in New York, Johns is considered a self-taught artist. His readings in psychology and philosophy, particularly the work of Wittgenstein; his study of Cézanne, Duchamp, Leonardo, Picasso, and other artists; and his love of poetry have all found expression in his work. His attention to history and his logical rigour led him to create a progressive body of work.

In 1954, after a dream, Johns painted a picture of the American flag (see fig.). At the time he was living in New York, as a struggling young artist. During the three years that followed, Johns painted more flags, as well as targets, alphabets, and other emblematic, impersonal images. None of this work was formally exhibited until ...