'International Pop' at the Art Museum: Eye-popping, thought-provoking overwhelming

The Philadelphia Museum of Art's overwhelming new exhibition "International Pop" invites us to look at a kind of art we thought we knew - an art that's all about commerce and comics and American postwar abundance - through foreign eyes. It combines iconic representative artworks of pop from the United States and Britain with works from Argentina, Brazil, Japan, Germany, and even Iceland.

The Art Museum wants us to call this show "I-Pop," and much of it truly is eye-popping, as well as mind-expanding. Still, as I looked at the first gallery, I found myself transported back to a half-forgotten moment of my childhood. In about 1956, housebound and recovering from, I think, chicken pox, I sat for hour after hour with a pile of a neighbor's discarded Life and Look magazines, cutting out images of cars and rockets, houses and refrigerators, and pasting them into books, creating primitive (and perhaps fortunately long-lost) collages.

The exhibition tells us that during the 1950s, artists in London and Bratislava, and many other places, were doing much the same thing, going through some of the same magazines and finding many of the same images. In April 1952 in London, Scottish artist Eduardo Paolozzi did a presentation in which he showed his collection, almost at random, on an overhead projector. It was a bit of a mess: The projector started to smoke, and some in the audience made rude comments. By some reckoning, this was when pop art was born.

I bring up my own memory not to imply that I was avant-garde at age 8, but rather to reflect on the near-inevitability of pop art. At the time, the mass illustrated magazine was in its final flowering, sumptuously recording the most vibrant consumer culture the world had ever known. Anyone with eyes had to respond. Moreover, some of the people creating those images - Andy Warhol, for instance - began manipulating them and exploring them.

There is every reason to believe "International Pop," organized by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and curated in Philadelphia by Erica Battle, will be popular. This art always has been, in large part because it seems easy to understand. You needn't puzzle over what the painting shows because you are familiar with Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck; Marilyn Monroe, Brigitte Bardot, and Mona Lisa; Standard Oil and Coca-Cola.

The world of mechanically reproduced images from which the works derive is 50 or 60 years old; it's grandpop art. It is completely different in nature from the contemporary, electronically mediated visual culture of seemingly limitless access. But we still recognize branding, seductive advertising, sexualized products, and packaged sexuality as part of our own world.

Pop art was never as easy as it seemed because, in most cases, you need to see beyond the look. This show, with the advantage of a half-century's passing and an international perspective, makes pop a little less comforting than usual. Even in the works of foreign artists, American imagery often dominates, in much the same way American economic, military, and cultural might dominated the post-World War II world.

In some cases, as with Hers Is a Lush Situation (1958) by the English artist-designer Richard Hamilton, the work is exploratory or celebratory. This painting-relief-collage by one of the first practitioners and theorists of pop explores the sensuous lines of American automobile design at a moment when such designers as General Motors' Harley Earl fashioned Cadillacs into rocketing Rubenesque goddesses. Hamilton also adds Sophia Lauren's lips, hanging in midair, in what Battle sees as a reference to Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass at the Art Museum. At a time when the art crowd both here and abroad held American automobile design in contempt, Hamilton saw it as something major that must be looked at.

Other explorations of American culture are more ambiguous. Foodscape (1964) by Icelandic artist Erró is hung next to the billboard-scaled Still Life (1963) by American Tom Wesselmann. Both play on American abundance and the advertising of processed food. But while Wesselmann seems wryly affectionate (Sunbeam white bread with bright yellow butter - yum!), Erró's picture is appetizing in the foreground, mildly disgusting in the middle distance, and a panoply of packages on the horizon. Is American abundance all it promises to be?

In Argentina and Brazil, where democratic regimes gave way in the early 1960s to American-backed military dictatorships, American imagery is used critically, but usually with a lot of wit. In La civilización occidental y cristiana (1965), Argentine artist León Ferrari attaches a large model of an American jet bomber to a plaster figure of the crucified Christ, both of which he bought, and aims it straight down at us. It's an icon of weaponized religion, a problem that is with us more than ever. (At the same time, Argentine artists celebrated their culture's extravagance and fashion with such works as Dalila Puzzovio's double platform shoes from 1967. These shoes, which she sold in limited editions at a store, are the ultimate cha-cha heels.)

But the darkest, most slyly political work is probably Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles' 1970 project in which he silk-screened dissident political messages onto the outside of Coca-Cola bottles, which he then returned to be refilled and redistributed. Instead of putting his messages in a bottle and throwing them into the sea, he used the commercial infrastructure to get his message out. In such an oppressive regime, it was the only way to get the message out. He subverted not just the dictatorship but also the Coca-Cola Co.

Now that's what I call pop art!

tom@thomashine.com

International Pop

Through May 15 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art,

26th Street and the Parkway.

Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday, until 8:45 p.m. Wednesday and Friday.

Admission: Adults, $20; seniors (65 and up), $18; students and youths (13-18), $14; children, free. (Discount available online.)

Information: 215-763-8100 or www.philamuseum.org.