A Decade of Pop Prints and Multiples, 1962–1972: The Frank Mitzel Collection marks the public debut of Southern California-based collector Frank Mitzel’s gift of more than sixty Pop Art prints to the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Assembled by Mitzel over the course of three decades, this vibrant collection offers an impressive and valuable survey of Pop’s growth across the United States, England, and Europe during an era of rapid transformation. Although it was never a monolithic or unifying movement, Pop Art emerged in London and New York in the mid- to late 1950s in response to the simultaneous exuberance and unease of the postwar period. Pop artists soon embraced printmaking as a democratic medium, one that enabled them to reach broad audiences—and thus was truly popular—while courting associations with the commercial culture that inspired their work. Rejecting the overblown heroism of the previous generation’s gestural abstraction, such artists turned to advertising and mass media, embracing bright hues, flat graphics, and rapid legibility.
In spite of its focus on a single art movement and a single decade, the Mitzel Collection is remarkably wide-ranging, reminding us that Pop Art itself was multifaceted, like the culture that inspired it. Several US-based artists featured in the Mitzel Collection, including Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Larry Rivers, the Venezuelan American artist Marisol, and Swedish expat Claes Oldenburg, were crucial early exponents of Pop. Exhibiting frequently in Europe, they were in dialogue with their transatlantic peers associated with the movement known as Nouveau réalisme, or New Realism, which emerged in Paris in 1960 and, like Pop, was catalyzed by the encroachment of consumerism into daily life. The Mitzel Collection bolsters the Museums’s existing holdings of artworks by figures such as Richard Artschwager, Roy Lichtenstein, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Rauschenberg, while introducing many new artists—especially from the heyday of British Pop—including Peter Blake, Richard Hamilton, Gerald Laing, and Joe Tilson. Included in the presentation is Jasper Johns’s Light Bulb I from 1st Etchings, 2nd State (1967-69), which is based on the artist’s first completed sculpture, Light Bulb I (1958), a cornerstone of MCASD’s collection.