Pop Art

Imagine having 28,543 Andy Warhol photos to spread around. That's how many the Andy Warhol Foundation is busy handing out, to 183 college and university art museums, as part of its Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Program. Here in the District, George Washington University has received a nice little stack of 152 images, of which 16 have gone on view in its Luther W. Brady Art Gallery, alongside works by other artists of Warhol's era. At their best, Warhol's photos give a fine sense of the artist's mind and eye at work.

DON'T MISS This weekend is your last chance to see " Per Kirkeby: Paintings and Sculpture " at the Phillips Collection . The tightly focused exhibition showcases 26 paintings and 11 bronze sculptures by the contemporary Danish artist. Kirkeby has flirted with different styles, including Pop art, but is best known for his large, expressionistic pictures, which convey a powerful, even terrifying, sense of space. — Michael O'Sullivan Through Sunday at 1600 21st St. NW (Metro: Dupont Circle)

Richard Hamilton, a British Pop Art pioneer who depicted former British prime minister Tony Blair as a cowboy and designed the cover of the Beatles' "White Album," has died. He was 89. The Gagosian Gallery, which represents Mr. Hamilton, said he died Sept. 13 at an undisclosed location in Britain. It did not give the cause of death. Mr. Hamilton was often called the "Father of Pop Art" — Britain's answer to Andy Warhol — and he was credited with coining the name for a movement marked by its ironic and iconic use...

The Phillips Collection emphasizes the serious side of Danish artist Per Kirkeby in what is billed as the most comprehensive show devoted to his work so far in the United States. Although Kirkeby, who was born in 1938, has hovered around the edges of different art movements in the past century, including pop art and the contrarian, anti-art celebrants of Fluxus, he remains hard to define. Of the 26 paintings and 11 bronzes on display at the Phillips, only a handful hints at his pop flirtations.

The Phillips Collection emphasizes the serious side of Danish artist Per Kirkeby in what is billed as the most comprehensive show devoted to his work so far in the United States. Although Kirkeby, who was born in 1938, has hovered around the edges of different art movements in the past century, including pop art and the contrarian, anti-art celebrants of Fluxus, he remains hard to define. Of the 26 paintings and 11 bronzes on display at the Phillips, only a handful hints at his pop flirtations.

NEW DELHI -- Pastoral poster images of cherubic Hindu goddesses on embroidered jackets. Indian comic strips, replete with kitschy thought balloons, on the dresses of runway models. Manish Arora, perhaps India's most flamboyant fashion designer, says he finds inspiration everywhere he turns these days: in the cheesy pop art graphics on the backs of trucks and auto-rickshaws, the visual exaggeration of India's Bollywood movies, and even storefront signage. The zany melange of colors that permeates the streetscape...

Roy Lichtenstein. The painter's name is linked with his signature comic-book images of women, their thoughts rising in text bubbles above tentacles of tousled hair, mounds of tears leaking from their eyes. In 1993, a blockbuster Lichtenstein retrospective at the Guggenheim , some 200 pieces strong, sealed the painter's reputation as a prime instigator of Pop art. This week, another major Lichtenstein show (" Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective" ) arrives at the National Gallery,...

DON'T MISS This weekend is your last chance to see " Per Kirkeby: Paintings and Sculpture " at the Phillips Collection . The tightly focused exhibition showcases 26 paintings and 11 bronze sculptures by the contemporary Danish artist. Kirkeby has flirted with different styles, including Pop art, but is best known for his large, expressionistic pictures, which convey a powerful, even terrifying, sense of space. — Michael O'Sullivan Through Sunday at 1600 21st St. NW (Metro:...

It's hardly startling to learn that Ilya Kabakov, half of the Ukrainian-born husband-and-wife duo whose conceptual artwork is currently at Hemphill Fine Arts , began his artistic career as a children's book illustrator. The exhibition features pleasant drawings and simple messages, as well as a nook with a mattress where a child might curl up to nap, watched over by 3D illustrations mounted low on the wall. But if Ilya and Emilia Kabakov like domestic art, they're less keen on...

PHILADELPHIA -- As radical social changes rocked 1960s America, the contemporary art world remained largely a boys' club that mostly ignored female Pop artists as their male counterparts grew to become icons of the era, according to a new exhibit. "Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists 1958-1968," an exhibit at the University of the Arts through March 15, focuses exclusively on the forgotten women of Pop Art and shows about 50 works -- some not seen publicly in 40 years -- of 20 female Pop artists from the United...

Roy Lichtenstein. The painter's name is linked with his signature comic-book images of women, their thoughts rising in text bubbles above tentacles of tousled hair, mounds of tears leaking from their eyes. In 1993, a blockbuster Lichtenstein retrospective at the Guggenheim , some 200 pieces strong, sealed the painter's reputation as a prime instigator of Pop art. This week, another major Lichtenstein show (" Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective" ) arrives at the National Gallery, fresh from the ...

The Chinese authorities have done a terrible job of stifling artist Ai Weiwei . Since 2009 they've shut down his blog, detained him, kept him under house arrest, beaten him, confiscated his passport and torn down his just-built studio in Shanghai. All of this, predictably, has helped catapult him to renown in the West. Prices for his work have soared, and his name is recognized as a "dissident's" by people who have no idea what his art looks like. Last Tuesday, authorities closed his company, the...

There's hasn't been a full retrospective of Roy Lichtenstein's career since the artist died in 1997 at the age of 73. The National Gallery of Art remedies that with "Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective," a large, 134-object exhibition devoted to the artist's long and productive career (Oct. 14). Sprawling over 15,000 square feet of the gallery's East Building, the Lichtenstein show surveys every major chapter of the artist's oeuvre, from the early pop paintings through the comic-book...

"Visionary art" is the polite term for stuff made by untutored artists, sometimes called "outsider" or "naive. " But, then, most visual artists aspire to being visionary, or something like that. And the pieces in " Messages From Outsiderdom ," the Joan Hisaoka Healing Arts Gallery's abundant exhibition of the genre, are not especially naive. With its candy colors and junkyard ingredients, the work may be friskier than the most austere strains of contemporary art, but it's been executed with...

In 2009, Randall Scott moved his gallery from Logan Circle to Brooklyn. Now he's back in town, without a permanent location but with an interesting selection of artists. Scott's current group show, "Untitled No. 1," is on display in a warehouse near the 9:30 Club. The building is un-air-conditioned and marked for demolition, but it's a good fit for this exhibition of often brash work by seven New York and Los Angeles artists. While the show includes art that's exquisitely detailed or...

For all its highfalutin discourse — on abstract expressionism, Dionysus vs. Apollo, the pernicious advance of pop art — the most engrossing moment of Arena Stage's immensely enjoyable "Red" comes when the two actors dip their brushes into buckets and paint. The activity in which the superbly matched Edward Gero and Patrick Andrews engage, in point of fact, is priming a canvas half again as tall as the two of them. The priming becomes primal. As the classical music on a phonograph swells, the painters...

How pop was Tom Wesselmann, really? If you're the Kreeger Museum, the answer is: popper than pop. "A Pop Art icon," even, according to the publicity accompanying Wesselmann's drawings show on view at the Kreeger through July 30. What else were they going to say? Institutions don't host shows about a "lesser light of pop" or an "exuberant but conservative pop-art bench player" or an "ambiguous figure on the margins of pop who himself seemed iffy about the whole enterprise. " Yet all of those labels apply to Wesselmann, an...

John Logan, author of the hit play "Red," gets pop art and minimalism all wrong. Those may seem like small details given the phenomenal success of his London and Broadway hit, which won six Tony Awards in 2010, including best play. The drama centers on a critical period in abstract painter Mark Rothko's career when he was creating a set of high-profile murals for the new Four Seasons Restaurant in New York City. It isn't directly concerned with either pop art or minimalism, movements that helped organize the art...

It's hardly startling to learn that Ilya Kabakov, half of the Ukrainian-born husband-and-wife duo whose conceptual artwork is currently at Hemphill Fine Arts , began his artistic career as a children's book illustrator. The exhibition features pleasant drawings and simple messages, as well as a nook with a mattress where a child might curl up to nap, watched over by 3D illustrations mounted low on the wall. But if Ilya and Emilia Kabakov like domestic art, they're less keen on domestic...