Reviews for Pop L.A.: Art and the City in the 1960s

The average rating for Pop L.A.: Art and the City in the 1960s based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-04-11 00:00:00 Michael Nguyen If looking for an overview of this movement, one could do know wrong by starting here. Much of what I read, I was already familiar with, but It was good to find in detail other things that I wasn't. This books examines the art and people of this movement who with a passion pushed forward their ideas and designs to a mass audience. It contains many beautiful posters, photographs, paintings, architectural and interior drawings and uses quotes by people from this period. We come to think of the 1960s as an age of revolutionary change, but so many changes politically and technologically came from and not long after this period too. So many of the artists here set themselves apart from norms and convention, prominently featuring Whistler and Wilde. This detailed account of the movement explores various themes, such as the influence of Japanese art, the sleeping woman and representation, nature, and fashionable interior design. Here you will find the usual suspects, Whistler, Wilde, Ruskin, Morris, Crane, Alma-Tadema, Tiffany, but good to see Kate Greenaway, Gustave Doré, Margaret Cameron, Edward Burne-Jones, E.W.Godwin, Ellen Terry, Gilbert and Sullivan and Simeon Solomon. Using various sources, in particular the letters that people wrote, one can hear the voices of that age. It features too the work of critics in newspapers and magazines and is also amusing at times. In reference to Swinbourne: "However, the latter's drunken delight in sliding naked down the bannisters of the staircase in pursuit of Simeon Solomon 'dancing all over the studio like a wild cat' was, Rosesetti declared, 'enough to drive me crazy' ". Wild indeed!

Review # 2 was written on 2009-08-05 00:00:00 Keith R Brown A really nice overview of the origins of Art Brut. Learned a lot from this book and it's given me a lot of new artists to explore. A little surprised that the section on music inspired/based on the work of Adolf Wolfli failed to mention either Graeme Revell or Nurse With Wound. I think those recordings were my first introduction to Adolf Wolfli and perhaps even Art Brut.