Pop Artists - United States - Early Exhibitions

Early Exhibitions

Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine and Tom Wesselmann had their first shows in the Judson Gallery in 1959/60. In 1960 Martha Jackson showed installations and assemblages, New Media - New Forms featured Hans Arp, Kurt Schwitters, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Jim Dine and May Wilson. In 1961, Oldenburg created a store for Martha Jackson's spring show Environments, Situations, Spaces. In December he showed The Store at his studio. Andy Warhol held his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles in early July 1962 at Irving Blum's Ferus Gallery where he showed 32 paintings of Campell's soup cans, one for every flavor. Warhol sold the set of paintings to Blum for 1,000$; in 1996, when the Museum of Modern Art acquired it, the group was valued at $15 million.

In London, the annual RBA exhibition of young talent in 1960 first showed American Pop influences. In January 1961, the most famous RBA-Young Contemporaries of all put David Hockney, the American R B Kitaj, New Zealander Billy Apple, Allen Jones, Derek Boshier, Patrick Caulfield, Peter Phillips and Peter Blake on the map - Apple designed the posters and invitations for both the 1961 and 1962 Young Contemporaries exhibitions. Hockney, Kitaj and Blake went on to win prizes at the John-Moores-Exhibition in Liverpool in the same year. Apple and Hockney travelled together to New York during the Royal College's 1961 summer break, which is when Apple first made contact with Andy Warhol - both later moved to the United States and Apple became involved with the New York pop scene.

Opening October 31, 1962, Willem de Kooning's New York art dealer, the Sidney Janis Gallery, organized the groundbreaking International Exhibition of the New Realists, a survey of new to the scene American Pop, French, Swiss, Italian New Realism, and British Pop art. The fifty-four artists shown included Richard Lindner, Wayne Thiebaud, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Jim Dine, Robert Indiana, Tom Wesselmann, George Segal, Peter Phillips and Peter Blake (his large The Love Wall from 1961) and Yves Klein, Arman, Daniel Spoerri, Christo, Mimmo Rotella. Martial Raysse, Niki de Saint-Phalle and Jean Tinguely saw the show in New York and were stunned by the size and the look of the American work. Also shown were Marisol, Mario Schifano, Enrico Baj and Öyvind Fahlström. Janis lost some of his abstract expressionist artists, as Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb and Philip Guston quit the gallery but gained Dine, Oldenburg, Segal and Wesselmann. Later that evening, October 31, 1962, at an opening-night soiree thrown by the wealthy collector Burton Tremaine, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Wesselmann, Rosenquist, and Indiana were all being served drinks by uniformed maids when de Kooning appeared in the doorway and was swiftly turned away by Tremaine, who ironically owned a number of de Koonings works. Rosenquist recalled that "at that moment I thought, something in the art world has definitely changed". Turning away Willem de Kooning, a respected abstract artist, proved that as early as 1962, the pop art movement began to dominate art culture in New York.

A bit earlier, on the West-coast, Roy Lichtenstein, Jim Dine and Andy Warhol from NYC, Phillip Hefferton and Robert Dowd from Detroit; Edward Ruscha and Joe Goode from Oklahoma City, and Wayne Thiebaud from California were included in the New Painting of Common Objects show. This first Pop Art museum exhibition in America was curated by Walter Hopps at the Pasadena Art Museum . Pop Art now was a success and was going to change the art world forever. New York followed Pasadena in 1963 when the Guggenheim Museum exhibited Six Painters and the Object, curated by Lawrence Alloway. The artists were Jim Dine, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, and Andy Warhol. Another pivotal early exhibition was The American Supermarket organised by the Bianchini Gallery in 1964. The show was presented as a typical small supermarket environment, except that everything in it — the produce, canned goods, meat, posters on the wall, etc., was created by prominent pop artists of the time, including Apple, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Wesselmann, Oldenburg, and Johns - this project was recreated as part of the Tate Gallery's Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture in 2002.

By 1962, the Pop artists began to exhibit in commercial galleries in New York and Los Angeles, for some it was their first commercial one-man show. The Ferus Gallery presented Andy Warhol in Los Angeles and Ed Ruscha in 1963. In New York, the Green Gallery showed Rosenquist, Segal, Oldenburg, and Wesselmann, the Stable Gallery R. Indiana and Warhol (his first New York show), the Leo Castelli Gallery presented Rauschenberg, Johns, and Lichtenstein, Martha Jackson showed Jim Dine, and Allen Stone showed Wayne Thiebaud. By 1965–1966 after the Green Gallery and the Ferus Gallery closed the Leo Castelli Gallery represented Rosenquist, Warhol, Rauschenberg, Johns, Lichtenstein and Ruscha, The Sidney Janis Gallery represented Oldenburg, Segal, Wesselmann and Marisol, while Allen Stone continued to represent Thiebaud, and Martha Jackson continued representing Robert Indiana.

In 1968, the "Sao Paulo 9 Exhibition - Environment U.S.A.: 1957 - 1967" featured the "Who's Who" of the Pop Art Icons. It could be considered as a summation of the classical phase of the American Pop Art period.The exhibit was curated by William Seitz. The artists were Edward Hopper, James Gill, Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and Tom Wesselmann.