The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (380 page)

pompier, l'art
.

A term applied pejoratively to French academic art (more particularly pretentious
history painting
) of the late 19th cent. It is said to derive from the habit of posing nude models wearing firemen's helmets to substitute for ancient helmets (‘pompier’ is French for ‘fireman’).

 
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(1855–1923).
French sculptor. He worked for fifteen years as an assistant of
Rodin
and success came to him very late, when he made a name with his
Polar Bear
(Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris) at the 1922
Salon
d'Automne. This became enormously popular, reproduced in a variety of forms, and Pompon was hailed as the greatest animal sculptor since
Barye
.

 
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Pont-Aven, School of
.

Term applied to painters associated with
Gauguin
during his periods of work at the town of Pont-Aven in Brittany, 1886–94, and inspired by his anti-naturalistic style. Émile
Bernard
was among them, and he and Gauguin together developed
Synthetism
.

 
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(1494–1556).
Italian painter, born in the Tuscan village of Pontormo, near Empoli, and active in and around Florence. According to
Vasari
, he studied successively with
Leonardo da Vinci
,
Albertinelli
,
Piero di Cosimo
, and
Andrea del Sarto
, whose workshop he is said to have entered in 1512. Andrea was certainly a major influence on his early work. Pontormo was precocious (he was praised by
Michelangelo
whilst still a youth) and by the time he painted his
Joseph in Egypt
(NG, London) in about 1515 he had already created a distinctive style—full of restless movement and disconcertingly irrational effects of scale and space—that put him in the vanguard of
Mannerism
. The emotional tension apparent in this work reaches its peak in Pontormo's masterpiece, the altarpiece of the
Entombment
(
c.
1526–8) in the Capponi Chapel of Sta Felicità, Florence. Painted in extraordinarily vivid colours and featuring deeply poignant figures who seem lost in a trance of grief, this is one of the key works of Mannerism. Pontormo was primarily a religious painter, but he was also an outstanding portraitist (he was a major influence on his pupil and adopted son
Bronzino
) and in 1520–1 for the
Medici
villa at Poggio a Caiano he painted a memorable mythological work (
Vertumnus and Pomona
according to Vasari, but the identification is disputed) in which an apparently idyllic scene reveals a strong undercurrent of neurosis. In Pontormo's later work his style was enriched by the study of Michelangelo and
Dürer's
prints, but this stage of his career is known mainly through his superb drawings (best represented in the Uffizi), as the great fresco scheme in S. Lorenzo, Florence, that occupied him from 1546 until his death, was destroyed in the 18th cent. Pontormo's diary for part of 1554–6 remains, giving a day-to-day account of his progress. It tells us much of his neurotic character—melancholy and introspective, dismayed by the slightest illness.

 
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Pop art
.

A movement based on the imagery of consumerism and popular culture, flourishing from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, chiefly in the USA and Britain. The term was coined
c.
1955 by Lawrence
Alloway
. Comic books, advertisements, packaging, and images from television and the cinema were all part of the iconography of the movement, and it was a feature of Pop art in both the USA and Britain that it rejected any distinction between good and bad taste. In the USA Pop art was initially regarded as a reaction from
Abstract Expressionism
because its exponents brought back figural imagery and made use of
Hard Edge techniques
. It was seen as a descendant of
Dada
(in fact Pop art is sometimes called
Neo-Dada
) because it debunked the seriousness of the art world and embraced the use or reproduction of commonplace subjects (comic strips, soup tins, highway signs) in a manner that had affinities with
Duchamp's
ready-mades
. The most immediate inspiration, however, was the work of Jasper
Johns
and Robert
Rauschenberg
, both of whom began to make an impact on the New York art scene in the mid-1950s. They opened a wide new range of subject matter with Johns's paintings of flags, targets, and numbers and his sculptures of objects such as beer cans and Rauschenberg's
collages
and
combine paintings
with Coca-Cola bottles, stuffed birds, and photographs from magazines and newspapers. While often using similar subject matter, Pop artists generally favoured commercial techniques in preference to the painterly manner of Johns and Rauschenberg. Examples are Andy
Warhol's
silkscreens of soup tins, heads of Marilyn Monroe , and so on, Roy
Lichtenstein's
paintings in the manner of comic strips, and Mel
Ramos's
brash pinups. Claes
Oldenberg
, whose subjects include ice-cream cones and hamburgers, has been the major Pop art sculptor. John Wilmerding (
American Art
, 1976) writes that Pop art ‘cannot be separated from the culmination of affluence and prosperity during the post-World-War-II era. America had become a ravenously consuming society, packaging art as well as other products, indulging in commercial manipulation, and celebrating exhibitionism, self-promotion, and instant success… Pop's mass-media orientation may further be related to the acceleration of uniformity in most aspects of national life, whether restaurants or regional dialects. Shared by all Americans were the principal preoccupations of Pop art—sex, the automobile, and food.’
In Britain, too, Pop art revelled in a new glossy prosperity following years of postwar austerity. British Pop was nurtured by the
Independent Group
and the work that is often cited as the first fully-fledged Pop art image was produced under its auspices—Richard
Hamilton's
collage
Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing
? (Kunsthalle, Tübingen, 1956). However, British art first made a major impact at the
Young Contemporaries
exhibition in 1961 (at about the same time that American art became a force). The artists in this exhibition included Derek
Boshier
, David
Hockney
, Allen
Jones
, R. B.
Kitaj
, and Peter
Phillips
, who had all been students at the
Royal College of Art
. In the same year the BBC screened Ken Russell's
Monitor
film ‘Pop goes the easel’, in which Peter
Blake
was one of the featured artists. Although there are exceptions (notably the erotic sculptures of Allen Jones ), British Pop was generally less brash than American, expressing a more romantic view of the subject matter in a way that can now strike a note of nostalgia. Much of the imagery, however, came directly from the American world of pin-ups and pin-ball machines. Richard Hamilton defined Pop art as ‘popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, and Big Business’, and it was certainly a success on a material level, getting through to the public in a way that few modern movements do and attracting big money collectors. However, it was scorned by many critics. Harold
Rosenberg
, for example, described Pop as being ‘Like a joke without humour, told over and over again until it begins to sound like a threat… Advertising art which advertises itself as art that hates advertising.’