This is a new blog from a good friend of mine, an art historian from UWE. I know her posts are going to be well-informed as well as fascinating, and would encourage you to have a look.
Pauline Boty With Love to Jean Paul Belmondo
Pop artist Allen Jones is in the news: The Royal Academy is giving him a major retrospective exhibition and his sculptures of fetishized naked women as furniture are causing a rumpus again. He doesn’t seem to understand why women are so pissed off with these objectifying, demeaning images and is wriggling on a pin. One moment saying he is a feminist, another that it has nothing to do with women as such, he’s just an artist doing that avant garde, thang of challenging and offending accepted values in art**
The story of Pop is, indeed, of young male artists gleefully putting up two fingers to the masters (sic) of ‘serious’ Modernist orthodoxy. Transgressively they were bringing raw, ‘low taste’ popular culture into the hallowed halls of the galleries: Warhol’s soup tins and Marilyns, Lichtenstein’s blow-ups of comic book pages along with Wesselman’s nudes
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