José-Augusto França, “Mythologic Presentation: The New Imagery,” translated from Portuguese by Ruth Rosengarten, originally published as “Apresentação Mitológica da Nova Imagística,” in Oito Ensaios sobre Arte Contemporânea ­(Lisbon: Europa América, 1967), 121–149 (excerpts)

Abstract

This article was originally published in French in 1963 in Les Temps modernes, the journal founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The questions it raises are paradigmatic of the central concerns in Franca’s critical writings. He maps the artistic situation in the West from the beginning of the decade of the 1960s, providing a reading of American pre-Pop and Pop art, as well as the equivalent movements in Europe, which he yokes together more broadly under the sign of “the new imagery.” The postcard collages of Peter Blake (who, at the age of thirty-one, is dubbed the old man of English Pop art), and his constructions of “windows,” with their playful, old-fashioned appearance and their discreet tone, and—like some American works—revealing a certain nostalgia (Blake himself uses that word), forge other directions that remain closer to popular roots.