@mastersthesis {13135,
	title = {The Heartland of Pop: Claes Oldenburg and Jeff Koons in Chicago},
	year = {2020},
	school = {IFA/NYU},
	abstract = {In the early 1960s, several young artists who had recently arrived in New York City from the Midwest exhibited large-scale paintings and sculptures portraying motifs from American popular culture. Much of the New York art establishment, for whom avant-garde art meant abstract painting, initially denounced this development-which came to be known as Pop art. As Pop was assimilated into the history of postwar American art, several critics and scholars emphasized its formal affinity with contemporaneous hard-edge abstraction and Minimal art. At the same time, they adamantly distinguished the revival of recognizable imagery in Pop art from the so-called "return to the figure" associated with postwar art in the Midwest, especially the production of the Chicago Monster Roster and their descendants, the Hairy Who and the Chicago Imagists. Like the first wave of New York Pop art, Neo-Pop or Neo-Geo of the 1980s is generally understood as part of the legacy of Minimalism and pitted against another "return to figuration," Neo-Expressionism.

The Heartland of Pop: Claes Oldenburg, Jeff Koons, and the Chicago Imagists interrogates the prevailing New York-centric, anti-figurative narrative of Pop and Neo-Pop art, tracing a new genealogy for the titular artists associated with these movements that illuminates the specter of the human figure in their works. The striking similarity between Oldenburg{\textquoteright}s and Koons{\textquoteright}s anthropomorphic, monumental sculptures of common, mass-produced objects, I argue, registers an affinity that extends much deeper, to their shared formation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). It was there that Oldenburg, through dialogue with Monster Roster artists Leon Golub, George Cohen, and H. C. Westermann, cultivated an anthropological approach to vernacular culture that he would later expand into his first major work, The Street. So it also was with Koons, who studied under the second generation of Chicago Imagists at SAIC. Yet, despite Koons{\textquoteright}s frequent invocation of Ed Paschke, Karl Wirsum, and Jim Nutt, scholarly discussion of his work in connection with Imagism is absent. In excavating these vital artistic exchanges between key figures of New York Pop art and Chicago Imagism, this study reframes both as part of a cultural reckoning of a deep-seated rift between populism (in its historical, progressive sense) and elitism, and between the Heartland and the coasts of the United States, that persists today.},
	keywords = {North America, Sculpture},
	author = {Pocock, Antonia}
}
