The largest exhibition of Pop Art ever held in Italy has opened in Rome, celebrating the breadth of the movement that took the art world by storm in the mid-1950s with its portrayal of company logos, pin-up girls, comic strip heroes and celebrities of the age.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm and the Hayward Gallery in London are among the institutions worldwide that have loaned works for the show at the Scuderie del Quirinale, which features around 100 paintings, sculptures and assemblages.
Although the Pop Art craze began in Britain and the United States, the movement also crept across Europe in the 1960s and works by Andy Warhol, Richard Hamilton and Roy Lichtenstein on display here rub shoulders with those by Italian, French and Spanish artists.
Curator Walter Guadagnini explains Pop Art's enduring success as the result of the democratisation of art, which blurred the margins between high and low culture with the use of images from film, music, magazines and advertising.
"Pop works play on subjects that are immediately recognisable, making it appealing even to an audience otherwise unused to appreciating themes in contemporary art," Guadagnini said.
"Even today Pop Art attracts the public - the most successful exhibitions are consistently those dedicated to the movement or to one of its artists, and record-setting sales at auctions are always related to the protagonists of Pop Art or their precursors," he added.
The exhibition kicks off with Martial Raysse's Proposition to Escape: Heart Garden (1966), a flashing neon and plexi-i'glass installation of hearts, grass and a gated fence in bold colours, a defining work in kitsch that sets the tone for the rest of the show.
The first section of the exhibition is dedicated to the entry of the consumer society into the world of art with larger-than-life images of humdrum household appliances and goods.
Among the works on display are Andy Warhol's Brillo Box (1964-68) and two 'soft' sculptures by Claes Oldenberg made from stuffed and painted material: a pillow-like replica of an enormous light switch in Soft Light Switches 'Ghost' Version (1963) and a packed lunch of white bread sandwiches in Lunch Box (1961).
Starlets, politicians and sportsmen of the era are the theme of the second section, which is devoted to the celebrity icons of Pop Art.
Works include Warhol's legendary Marilyn Monroe (1968), Fabio Mauri's two-dimensional Frank Sinatra (1964), and a portrait of Italian actress Virna Lisi sitting on a hamburger, naked apart from a green bead necklace, sinking into the soft bun beneath her in Mel Ramos' Virnaburger (1965).
The third section of the exhibition deals with Pop Art s reworking of characters and styles from the world of comic strips as well as its irreverent treatment of themes and personalities from history.
Among the paintings on display are David Hockney's Renaissance Head (1963), an ironic and affectionate nod to Piero della Francesca, and Mario Schifano's wild-bearded portrait of Leonardo Da Vinci (1963).
The human body as an object among many in consumer society is addressed in the fourth and final section of the show, with erotically charged works portraying fragments of people, their faces covered or erased.
Harold Stevenson's The New Adam (1962), a massive truncated nude portrait of American actor Sal Mineo, stretches the entire length of the room.
Allen Jones' assemblage Barely There (1967-68) shows the bottom half of a stiletto-heeled, semi-naked woman kneeling on a chequered linoleum, disappearing into the wall just above her waist in a comment on the anonymity of the individual in mass society.
"There are people who accused Pop Art of selling its soul to the devil, making art compete with fashion, advertising and so called commercial art," Guadagnini said.
"It's more correct to say Pop Art assimilated these elements and placed them in its own historical context".
Pop Art 1956-1968 runs at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome until January 27 2008.
