sag, and warp under the pressures of atmospheric force and gravity.
Born Jewish in Hitler’s Germany, the young Hesse hid with a Chris-
tian family when her parents and elder sister had to flee the Nazis.
She did not reunite with them until the early 1940s, just before her
parents divorced. Those extraordinary circumstances helped give
her a lasting sense that the central conditions of modern life are
strangeness and absurdity. Struggling to express these qualities in
her art, she created informal sculptural arrangements with units of-
ten hung from the ceiling, propped against the walls, or spilled out
along the floor. She said she wanted her pieces to be “non art, non
connotative, non anthropomorphic, non geometric, non nothing,
everything, but of another kind, vision, sort.”^14
Hang-Up (FIG. 36-19) fulfills these requirements. The piece
looks like a carefully made empty frame sprouting a strange feeler
that extends into the room and doubles back to the frame. Hesse
wrote that in this work, for the first time, her “idea of absurdity or
extreme feeling came through....[Hang-Up] has a kind of depth I
don’t always achieve and that is the kind of depth or soul or absur-
dity of life or meaning or feeling or intellect that I want to get.”^15
The sculpture possesses a disquieting and touching presence, sug-
gesting the fragility and grandeur of life amid the pressures of the
modern age. Hesse was herself a touching and fragile presence in the
art world. She died of a brain tumor at age 34.Pop Art
Despite their differences, the Abstract Expressionists, Post-Painterly
Abstractionists, and Minimalists all adopted an artistic vocabulary
of resolute abstraction. Other artists, however, observing that the in-
sular and introspective attitude of the avant-garde had alienated thepublic, sought to harness the communicative power of art to reach a
wide audience. However, they did not create reactionary or aca-
demic work. Their art still incorporated avant-garde elements, but
their focus was not on the formalist issues characteristic of the mod-
ernist mindset.
The artists of the Pop Art movement reintroduced all of the de-
vices the postwar avant-garde artists, in search of purity, had purged
from their abstract and often reductive works. Thus, Pop artists re-
vived the tools traditionally used to convey meaning in art, such as
signs, symbols, metaphors, allusions, illusions, and figural imagery.
They not only embraced representation but also produced an art
firmly grounded in consumer culture and the mass media, thereby
making it much more accessible and understandable to the average
person. Indeed, the name “Pop Art” (credited to the British art critic
Lawrence Alloway) is short for “popular art” and referred to the pop-
ular mass culture and familiar imagery of the contemporary urban
environment. This was an art form rooted in the sensibilities and vi-
sual language of a late-20th-century mass audience.
RICHARD HAMILTON Art historians trace the roots of Pop
Art to a group of young British artists, architects, and writers who
formed the Independent Group at the Institute of Contemporary Art
in London in the early 1950s. They sought to initiate fresh thinking
in art, in part by sharing their fascination with the aesthetics and
content of such facets of popular culture as advertising, comic books,
and movies. In 1956 an Independent Group member,Richard
Hamilton(b. 1922), made a small collage,Just What Is It That Makes
Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? (FIG. 36-20), which exem-
plifies many of the attitudes of British Pop Art. Trained as an engi-
neering draftsman, exhibition designer, and painter, Hamilton stud-
ied the way advertising shapes public attitudes. Long intrigued by36-19Eva Hesse,Hang-Up,1965–1966. Acrylic on cloth over wood
and steel, 6 7 6 6 . Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (gift of
Arthur Keating and Mr. and Mrs. Edward Morris by exchange).
Hesse created spare and simple sculptures with parts that extend into
the room. She wanted her works to express the strangeness and
absurdity that she considered the central conditions of modern life.36-20Richard Hamilton,Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes
So Different, So Appealing? 1956. Collage, 10^1 – 4 9 –^34 . Kunsthalle
Tübingen, Tübingen.
The fantasy interior in Hamilton’s collage reflects the values of modern
consumer culture through figures and objects cut from glossy maga-
zines. Toying with mass-media imagery typifies British Pop Art.Painting and Sculpture, 1945 to 1970 9811 ft.
1 in.