“Artists have been fascinated by photography since the invention of the camera, but in the 1960s the combination of photos, film and mass reproduction spawned the media age,” said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. “The real story of pop art, this compact but brilliant show suggests, is how painters responded to the secondhand nature of experience, the replacement of real life by mechanical images.”
It is subtitled “Portraiture from Francis Bacon to Andy Warhol“, but Bacon is an “outlier”: most of the works are from the “plastic fantastic” age. “Icons of the 1960s float by like lonely astronauts”: Yuri Gagarin smiling in Joe Tilson’s “Gagarin, Star, Triangle” (1968); Ursula Andress emerging from the sea in the Bond film “Dr. No” in Colin Self’s 1965 collage featuring a nuclear fallout shelter sign; Marilyn Monroe in publicity shots screenprinted by Richard Hamilton in “My Marilyn” (1965). Although it takes up just one room, this exhibition at Bath’s Holburne Museum is a fresh and “fascinating rethink” of a much-mythologised artistic movement.
There’s “barely a conventional portrait in sight” here, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. Indeed, this is less an exhibition about portraiture than “a portrait of an age”. The first thing we see here is a 1956 Bacon painting, an “ectoplasmic smudge” of an image based on a photo of Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X – a work he never actually saw in the flesh.
We then progress to the 1960s, when artists began to scrutinise the nature of celebrity itself. There are some great things here: Jann Haworth’s “Mae West Dressing Table” (1965), a sculpture fashioned from fabric, lights and a mirror, is “a creepy shrine to a Hollywood sex symbol”; a “chin-stroking” 1967 self-portrait by Warhol sees the artist gazing out with “an impenetrably wry expression”. The show’s thesis is arguably a little obvious: that this was an age “obsessed with movie starlets and pop idols, space travel and Americana, which could be both tawdry and exultant”, and which, “thanks to the spectre of nuclear apocalypse”, was “shot through with unease”. But there are certainly plenty of “charismatic” works to see here.
The premise “is hardly new”, agreed Nancy Durrant in The Times, but the “good range of work” makes up for it. The earliest is a 1935 self-portrait by Walter Sickert, “based on a news snapshot of the (by then) famous artist”. There’s Peter Blake’s 1965 portrait of David Hockney in Hollywood. And it’s “great” to see Hamilton’s classic pop art painting of Mick Jagger and the art dealer Robert Fraser, arriving at court to be tried on drugs charges. Based on a press photo, “Swingeing London ’67” (1968-69) was “a comment on the establishment backlash” against a “new generation of high- profile upstarts”. This is a thought-provoking show, even if it does “feel a little like a showreel for a bigger production”.
The Holburne Museum, Bath. Until 5 May