|
Audio Guide Transcript
Narrator: Images of celebrities were a common theme in the work of artists in the 1960s.
The ultimate pin-up was Marilyn Monroe, and after her death in 1963 - in mysterious circumstances - she became a tragic as well as a
glamorous figure.
Pauline Boty painted her in 1963 in this picture, The Only Blonde in the World.
Professor of film and art history at Birkbeck, University of London, Laura Mulvey:
Laura M: "Pauline Boty herself was very much an icon of glamour within the art world in the early to mid Sixties;
there are very appealing sequences in Ken Russell's little film Pop Goes the Easel of Pauline backcombing her hair, doing her make-up,
doing her eyes, getting ready for the day and there's something you can see in this picture of Marilyn which is also a tribute to the
way all young women of that time wouldn't have gone out into the world without, actually, their make-up, and their hair backcombed up
as high as it would go.
I also think that images of American popular culture were of great significance in Britain during this period.
American popular culture has been a means of avoiding the dead hand of class that's always articulated social life in Britain, and
it often seems to me that that was one of the reasons why pop art was so important at this time.
Artists emerging onto the scene weren't necessarily coming from the middle classes, coming from working class backgrounds just as much
which is made very clear in the Ken Russell Pop Goes the Easel film, that to use American popular culture was to use an idiom
that didn't necessarily mark you by your class origins, which was something that was difficult to avoid otherwise in the cultural and
social situation in Britain."
Dur: 1'50" |
back to