Customer Reviews

Pop Art (Phaidon Colour Library)

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I love the Phaidon Colour Art Library. I have bought 7-8 of these books, including the Durer, Rembrandt and Klimt treatments, which were all superb books with excellent analysis and ultra-high-quality color reproductions. The Durer and Rembrandt books alone made me spend another $120 on books by these two. This Pop Art treatment was also quite fascinating and opened my eyes and made me go out and spend another $100 on modern art books. It surveys a fascinating, well-chosen selection of the works of dozens of representative pop/modern artists. A thoughtful analysis accompanies each painting/work, and taken collectively these descriptions comprehensively cover a range of themes, ideas, thoughts and paradigms of 20th century post-World War II art. For those who think that 20th century art, pop art or post-World War II art is "flimsy" in character or insightfullness compared to previous eras, this book is well-tailored. One finds that in fact there is a vast quantity of substance to the various art paradigms covered in the works represented here, and that these works do build new foundations and directions for thought. I personally found most of the works fascinating, from Jasper John's "Flag" and "Fool's House," which alone made me travel to the MOMA in search of Johns works and spend $33 on a MOMA book by Johns, to Rauschenberg's Odalisque, to Warhol's Cambell Soup Can, to Jim Din's "Child's Blue Wall," to Oldenburg's hilarious and lurid "Shoestring Potatoes Spilling from a Bag," to the "Wham" comic book "rendition" by Lichtenstein, to works by Wesselmann, Peter Blake, Ruscha, and many others. The book covers many important classics of recent times, and may well be, for such a low price, the best all-around introuction to both pop art and modern art. For [the price], I think it gives a great return in terms of "units of education acquired" per dollar spent.

This was an inexpensive book on Pop Art. As such it's fairly basic, reproductions are good, choice of artists good. The text mostly describes the artists and not so much the Pop Art movement. For the price it's a good, nothing fancy here though.