The American Art Tapes: Voices of American Pop Art

Tells the story of 1960s pop art through the voices of its creators

In 1965, British artist and university lecturer John Jones left the United Kingdom with his wife and daughters to live in the United States for a year and interview some 100 artists. The family moved to Greenwich Village and spent three months on a road trip west to visit artists beyond the immediate reach of New York. Some of the artists, like Yoko Ono and Claes Oldenburg, became Jones's personal friends. Although Jones's daughter Nicolette was young, her memories of New York and their transAmerican adventure are vivid. Published here for the first time, this book presents a fascinating selection of Jones's edited conversations with American artists practicing in 1965-66. A foreword by Nicolette contextualizes the setting in which these interviews took place, and a further introduction amalgamated from Jones's lectures in which he drew on these conversations illustrates and explores the range of contrasting ideas behind what became known as pop art.

Thanks to his personal interaction with the artists and his knowledge of their work, Jones became the foremost expert in the art of this period in the UK. Amid a unique family story, this is art presented not through the filter of art critics, but from the mouths of the practitioners. Jones's interviews explore a specific place and time: the United States in the 1960s, and are crucial reading for those wishing to understand the decade and the influence of American art and British tradition on each other, as well as anyone curious about the famous figures of the time and the thinking that gave rise to this extraordinarily fertile creative moment.

Author: Nicolette Jones, John Jones
Publisher: Tate Publishing(UK)
Published: 01/18/2022
Pages: 240
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.60lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.30w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9781849767576


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 01/01/2022 pg. 63

About the Author
John Jones (1926-2010) was a painter, filmmaker, teacher, and lecturer. Nicolette Jones is a writer, literary critic, and broadcaster, and has been the children's books reviewer of the Sunday Times for more than two decades. She is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow, and was a nominee for the 2012 Eleanor Farjeon Award for outstanding service to the world of children's books.