NEW YORK, NY.- Complementing the exhibition Abstract Expressionist New York, in the Werner and Elaine Dannheisser gallery on the fourth floor, is the installation On to Pop, which showcases a selection of Pop Art highlights from the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection.

In 1955, the influential critic Clement Greenberg published the essay “American-type painting,” which hailed the abstract, non-referential imagery and monumental scale of Abstract Expressionist canvases as the most advanced form of painting then practiced. That same year, the 25-year-old artist Jasper Johns painted an American flag. This familiar, iconic emblem belonged to the world of everyday things. Rendered in wax encaustic and augmented with collage, the work’s tactile, painterly surface and allover compositional structure engaged the visual language of Abstract Expressionism while it pointed in a new direction.

On to Pop features familiar objects and images we encounter in our daily lives. In addition to Johns’s Flag, this installation includes Claes Oldenburg’s Red Tights with Fragment 9, Andy Warhol’s Gold Marilyn Monroe, and Roy Lichtenstein’s Drowning Girl. Collectively these works helped to define American Pop Art, a very different kind of “American-type” painting, which by the late 1960s had eclipsed Abstract Expressionism’s dominance on the New York scene.

On To Pop is organized by Anne Umland, Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture.