SESSION: This was Tomorrow: Reframing Pop

2026 marks the seventieth anniversary of This is Tomorrow, the seminal exhibition held at the Whitechapel Gallery in August 1956, and widely cited by scholarship as a definitive moment in the development of Pop Art.The ‘Pop’ on show in This is Tomorrow shared little in common with the later strategies of Warhol, Lichtenstein et al., instead being marked by what Lawrence Alloway described as the ‘ethnographic’ approach of the Independent Group. This localised fracturing and difference is matched by the painterly, abstract, or Kitchen Sink inflected approaches of other British ‘Pop’ artists. These anomalies mirror the heterogeneities of global responses to mass media in the post-war era, as well as the radically different subjectivities displayed in the art of women ‘Pop’ artists such as Evelyn Axell and Rosalyn Drexler. In short, for all Pop’s importance to ourunderstanding of contemporary art, there is precious little agreement on precisely what the term delimits. This panel thereby subjects both the specific histories of This is Tomorrow and the wider history of Pop Art to critical examination. Does ‘Pop’ remain a useful analytical framework and term for art historians? How is its efficacy determined by local and global contexts? What new narratives can we create when we challenge its familiar tropes and strictures?

Session Convenor:

Ed Kettleborough, University of Bristol

Session Speakers:

Ed Kettleborough, University of Bristol

Beyond the Principle

This paper – an introduction to the session – focuses upon the generation of artists who emerged from the Royal College of Art in the early 1960s. According to both contemporary critics and art historians, the likes of David Hockney, Derek Boshier, RB Kitaj, and Pauline Boty represented a ‘third wave’ in the story of British Pop Art. However, the College graduates thus lumped together were at best indifferent and more often deeply hostile to the Pop label, conceiving their practices in a host of individual terms. And critically, the lens of ‘Pop’ has worked to circumscribe the historical and formal contexts in which their art can be understood, foreclosing our ability to recognise (for instance) Hockney’s queer negativity, Boshier’s relation to nationhood and postcoloniality, or Boty’s explorations of Victoriana. And with Frank Bowling – a fellow member of the class of ’62, preoccupied with photographic representation and media construction – the hypocrisies of Pop have led to his College work being almost completely erased from art history’s gaze.

Taking a lead from this case study, I show how the term ‘Pop’ has long functioned as a floating signifier, one which lacks analytical depth and specificity, and instead proves an apt servant of ideology. My ensuing conclusion is that the very term ‘Pop’ itself needs to be placed under scrutiny, and that it is time for art history to wrest back a revisionist critical distance over the immense variety of modern and contemporary art that has been placed within – and without – Pop’s empire.

Nick Davies, University of Liverpool and Tate Liverpool

How Robby the Robot helped exhume Pere Ubu: Adrian Henri as Proto-Popular Modernist

In Adrian Henri’s final year studying at King’s College, Newcastle, he was taught by a member of the Independent Group, Richard Hamilton. Henri reflected ambivalently on Hamilton’s progressive teaching, seeing the activity as fun but not Art. This was until Henri experienced ‘This is Tomorrow’ at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1956, where he began to understand Hamilton’s pioneering spirit and reconceptualization of Art. From this point onward, Henri strove to develop his own voice and identity in both his poetry and his art practice in 1960s Liverpool.

Stemming from research on the Early Happenings (known as Events) by Henri in Liverpool, this paper aims to extend the concept of ‘popular modernism’ formulated by Mark Fisher to position Henri as a ‘proto-popular modernist’. The paper sits this term alongside that of ‘pop artist’ to reflect on the diverse influences both referenced and co-opted by Henri. The paper will focus on Henri’s egalitarian approach to his audiences, which drew on popular culture and its forms, while also drawing on art-historical avant-gardes. The ‘Events’ and artworks that ensued could be seen to be as much ‘fun’ as they were Art. They aimed as much for modernism as for popularity, ten years before the period Fisher discusses in the stirrings of ‘popular modernism’.

Oliver Peterson Gilbert, Sotheby’s Institute of Art

Independent Groups: Towards a Pluralisation of British Pop Arts

This paper leverages overlooked histories of artists, exhibitions, and institutions to pluralise and reconfigure singular conceptions of British Pop art, arguing for a long front of ‘British Pop arts’ to reflect the varied usage of a Pop sensibility across Britain during the 1960s. In doing so, it sidesteps triumphalist art-historical and, notably, art-market narratives that privilege protagonists from the Independent Group and the RCA and exclude artists operating outside such sanctioned networks as merely ‘derivative’ peripheries.

Conversely, this paper argues for the cultural and historical significance of such marginal artists and their ‘derivative’ pop art practices. It treats ‘pop art’ as a uniquely distributed artistic discourse: mobilised, contested, and reimagined by diverse actors across the British cultural field. For many of these marginal figures, a vibrant counter-network of artist-led, informal exhibitions in nightclubs, cinemas, and car showrooms afforded the distribution of their works, artworlds outside the narrow hegemony of Swinging London’s gallery-dealer system. Drawing on unpublished archival and oral history, the paper maps the peripheral pop art worlds of Liverpool, Coventry, and London, tracing the production of four illustrative Pop Arts, each with a strong regional accent. Local art schools emerge here as critical nodes, mediating between neo-avant-garde practices, educational reform (DipAD), urban transformation, and new forms of cultural economy. The paper concludes that attention to peripheral actors, practices, and artworlds opens methodological horizons for art history: demonstrating how discourses are produced, contested, and situated in place, while destabilising centre-biased narratives that have long shaped British Pop’s history.

Alena J. Williams, Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien

Pop and Rebellion in Los Angeles

This talk sets the conventional understanding of Pop aesthetics against the dystopian outcomes of racial capitalism in Los Angeles in the early to mid-1960s. In contrast to the near concurrent survey exhibitions of assemblage work at this time—The Art of Assemblage (1961) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the 1962 ‘neo-Dadaist’ exhibition The New Painting of Common Objects organized by Walter Hopps at the Pasadena Art Museum—Virginia Dwan’s group exhibition My Country ‘tis of Thee (1962) in Los Angeles grappled with a widening disillusionment of the post-World War II era in the United States. This talk reassesses and sharpens this reading, exploring the way in which the fractured lines between complicity and critique intersected within the nascent Pop aesthetics found on Los Angeles’s Westside. It argues that the Pop tendencies found in Los Angeles—exemplified by the appropriation of commodified goods—reflected the economic preoccupations of the metropole fulminating with the 1965 Watts Rebellion and the radical ethics of art production emerging in its wake. Underscoring a neglected confrontation in Pop’s historiography between the strategies of nouveau réalisme and assemblage in Los Angeles, this paper triangulates the work of international and local artists active in the gallery scene and the greater metropolitan area during this period.

Jun Zhang, University of York

Pop and Propaganda: Wu Shanzhuan’s Red Humour in Post-Mao China

This paper reconsiders the boundaries of Pop Art by examining Wu Shanzhuan’s Red Humour series in 1980s China, a body of work that critically engages with the visual and rhetorical legacy of Maoist propaganda through the lens of vernacular culture and grassroots creativity. Wu’s practice emerged during a period of profound transition, as China shifted from the ideological rigidity of the Cultural Revolution to the complexities of post-socialist reform. This era witnessed the rise of market mechanisms alongside continued state control, producing a contradictory cultural landscape in which official discourse coexisted with emerging popular and commercial forms.

Wu’s works, reminiscent of Big-character Posters used during the Cultural Revolution, combine revolutionary calligraphy with texts drawn from everyday life, advertising, and popular culture in the post-Mao era. These compositions often feature pseudo-characters and fragmented textual sequences that disrupt conventional reading and dissolve fixed meanings. By placing ideological slogans alongside colloquial phrases and commercial language, Wu recontextualises revolutionary rhetoric with absurdity and irony. His concept of Red Humour blends seriousness with satire, drawing on unofficial traditions, local idioms, and culturally embedded forms of expression that resist ideological orthodoxy and state control.

This case study contributes to the reframing of Pop by foregrounding how artists working outside dominant Euro-American traditions deploy humour, appropriation, and linguistic play to interrogate systems of meaning. Wu’s practice demonstrates how Pop can be grounded in grassroots cultural production and shaped by the specific historical and linguistic conditions of post-Mao China, offering a critical framework that challenges established definitions and expands the scope of Pop Art within global art history.

Response:

Hilary Floe, Tate Britain