114 IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 21, No.2 (2020)
American Pop Art in France: Politics of the
Transatlantic Image
Jan Baetens
Liam Considine, American Pop Art in France: Politics of the Transatlantic Image (Routledge Research in Art History)
New York, Routledge, 2019, 176 p. ISBN-13: 978-0367140137 (hardback)
The history of pop art is well known: it starts with the collage works of the Independent Group in the UK,
i h Richa d Hamil n 1956 J ha i i ha make da h me diffe en , a ealing a an
important milestone; it has a second birth at the other side of the ocean, with among others Lichtenstein and Warhol; and eventually it spreads as a global phenomenon in the first half of the Sixties. Also well known is the meaning of pop art: a war machine against the hegemony of abstract expressionism, an uncritical praise of and fascination with modern consumer society, a rejection of seriousness and politics, and perhaps also, but here things become trickier, a reopening of the debate on what is art (for many pop artists were exactly seen as asking he e i n: i hi a ? ).
American Pop Art in France is an important and well-researched
contribution to a rereading of both the history and the significance of pop art. The major interest of the book, besides of course the great quality of the five case studies that compose it, is to link the question
f a gl bali a i n i h ha f i meaning. B c i icall
challenging either of these elements (time-space and meaning), Considine offers a new mapping and discloses a complexity that has been overlooked by most historians as well as critics. Pop art may have gone from local (first London, then New York) to global (including France), but it is vital to underline the fundamentally glocal aspects of
a di emina i n. P a in F ance i definitely not the same as
in England or the States and this book offers a fine-grained reinterpretation of how this difference functions in several crucial fields (painting, cinema, comics, and poster art).
Pop art in France is not only different because of the existence of comparable, home-grown movements, more particularly New Realism (and although the focus of the book exclusively lies on the French reception of American pop art, Liam Considine usefully reminds us of the not always successful attempts to export this specifically French type of pop art to the US), but also
115 IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 21, No.2 (2020)
because of a totally different interpretation of the meaning of US pop art, which through Parisian art suddenly becomes very politicized. In France, pop art is considered a critique of the sprawling consumer culture. It is also seen as a satirical comment on US culture and imperialism.
The gap between the slick and superficial, unashamedly commercial and apolitical interpretation of pop art often given to these works not as a compliment, but as a reproach and the French appropriation of the movement is much more than just a matter of framing and reframing, for instance through the lens of anti-Americanism. First, the changing interpretation is the result of a change in corpus: the pop art shown in Paris is not exactly the pop art that had become mainstream, but a harsher, more difficult, more
a ma i ing kind, a e em lified b Wa h l dea h and di a e image . Sec nd, F ench a i did
not always consider American artists and intermediaries as allies of their own work and concerns, as shown
b he c nflic ing ela i n hi be een Pa i ian c i ic and US a maj in i i nal e e en a i e
in F ance, he S nnabend galle . Thi d, man F ench a i made de nemen f a f all
non-pop purposes, using them as a springboard to violent cultural critique see for instance the aggressive painting of Hollywood in the work by a director who has been a great admirer of US cinema (his 1963
Contempt still bears the double mark of fascination and repulsion) or the transformation of comics by the
Situationnists (but here with more repulsion than fascination).
Liam Considine examines this clash and the widening gap between French and American pop art via excellent close readings, opening hardly known archival material, but always with a clever return to familiar iconography that finds here a second life. A must-read for all those interested in an art movement that continues to raise fundamental questions, this book is also a useful warning to all forms of easy or rapid globalization.
Jan Baetens is Professor of Literary Theory and Cultural Studies at KU Leuven.
