Tilman Osterwold: 'Pop Art'

Hugh Grant recently sold an Andy Warhol portrait of Elizabeth Taylor for a whopping £11.4million at auction - more than ten times what Liz was paid for her role in Cleopatra, when she was the highest paid film actress in the world.

It's all very appropriate, and Warhol would wholeheartedly approve that his work is still raising up a mirror to the society where mass media controls what we think and value highly. Taking as his aim the wish to make art about the trivial, and in doing so trivialise art, Warhol has had a lasting effect on the art world. Yet while he's the most famous of the Pop artists, there are many more who have had more than 15 minutes of fame, explains Tilman Osterwold in his book, Pop Art.

The movement, born in the Sixties, was at its core a reaction to a new type of all-enveloping consumer culture, under which was a less polished and happy society than the adverts would have you believe. Osterwold's book has chapters on the key proponents of Pop, such as Jasper Johns and David Hockney, with loads and loads of reproductions of their diverse works to give you a good grounding in the subject. And then, if you want to look really clever, there's a collection of biographies of the more obscure names associated with this sometimes witty, often impenetrable family of artworks.

There's a nice balance struck between text and pictures in the book - it's not just for the coffee table, but has plenty chew on. Handy, as you need a bit of explanation as to what works like Jasper Johns' Target With Plaster Casts (of body parts) might mean, or Claes Oldenburg's cardboard model of a toilet. A golden age of conceptual art, indeed.

Published 15th November 2007 by Taschen.

Written by Caroline Lewis.