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Drawing on experience

Andrew Lambirth

Wednesday, 5th December 2007

Theatres of Life: Drawings from the Rothschild Collection, The Wallace Collection, Manchester Square, London W1, until 27 January 2008
Pop Art Portraits, National Portrait Gallery, until 20 January 2008, Sponsored by Lehman Brothers

At the National Portrait Gallery is a show of pictures that couldn’t be more different in appearance and intention. Pop Art Portraits is a paying exhibition (£9 admission, £7 concessions) guaranteed to pull the crowds: the day I visited, it was mobbed by teenagers, some of them even making sketches from the works on the walls. Pop is by its very nature demotic, drawing inspiration from the imagery of mass culture, from advertising and commercial graphics, from the worlds of popular music and entertainment. It enacts a kind of homage to consumerism, to the lowest common denominator, and thus set about changing the traditional hierarchies of fine art, democratising it and making it more accessible. You could say that dumbing down began here.

This exhibition opens with a group of typically inventive and irreverent collages by the late Eduardo Paolozzi, backed up by Nigel Henderson’s monumental ‘Head of a Man’ and Richard Hamilton’s ‘Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?’, both from 1956, and all of them classic proto-Pop images. Opposite is Robert Rauschenberg’s ‘Trophy V (for Jasper Johns)’, to bring the Americans into the equation. There’s much dispute as to whether the British or the Americans invented Pop Art, but it seems as if both strands evolved independently at pretty much the same time, with their own characteristics. The British version tends to be more subtle and pictorially more imaginative, the American more openly materialistic and concerned with simple fulfilment.