Major Pop Art exhibition opens in London

According to the LONDON (AFP) — A major new exhibition opened at the National Portrait Gallery in London on Thursday, bringing together 52 key works from one of the world's most popular and influential art movements -- Pop Art.

"Pop Art Portraits" contains works from 28 artists from Britain and the United States, including Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and David Hockney, and is designed to show how the genre revolutionised portrait painting.

It examines how the artists depicted the famous and their use of images drawn from advertising, pop music, the cinema, magazines and newspapers.

"Pop art portraits are not simply celebratory they are also disturbing," Paul Moorehouse, the gallery's 20th century curator, told reporters.

Among the works are Lichtenstein's acrylic "In the car", which uses the comic strip form, and two Warhol self-portraits conceived from photographs as well as his portraits of pop culture icons Marilyn Monroe and Elvis.

On the British side, canvasses by David Hockney, Richard Hamilton and Patrick Caulfield are also in evidence.

US artists led the Pop art movement, reacting against the burgeoning consumer society in the 1950s. British artists followed suit, impressed by its freedom after the lean years after World War II, Moorehouse said.

But the subjects themselves were just as important for the movement, he added.

"Pop Art took this tradition of portrait and reinvigorated it," he said.

Following the deaths of Marilyn Monroe and former US president John F. Kennedy and the Vietnam war, the late 1960s were less optimistic times, and that translates into the paintings, Moorehouse said.

The exhibition runs until January 20, 2008 before tranferring to the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, Germany from February 28-June 8.