This year marks the centennial of the birth of Surrealism with the publication of the Surrealist Manifesto in October 1924. Actually, make that manifestos, plural, as two tracts appearing within weeks of each other vied for the title. The first was written by Yvan Goll (1891–1950), a French-German poet with close ties to the German Expressionists; the other, more famous treatise was penned by André Breton (1896–1966), a French poet and critic whose talent for tireless self-promotion contributed to his ascension as Surrealism’s de facto leader and ideological enforcer.

Neither Goll nor Breton mentioned art in their respective statements. Moreover, neither actually coined the term Surrealism. That distinction belongs to Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918), a poet and prime proponent of the Parisian avant-garde, who used it in a 1917 letter to the Belgian critic Paul Dermée to describe the experimental ballet Parade (1917).

Aside from Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997) is the artist most closely identified with Pop Art. More than that, one could argue that Lichtenstein was the more insistently pop of the pair, as his subject matter, technique, and use of color ultimately derived from a single source—comic books—to which his work remained tied even as it evolved over time.

Within their respective oeuvres, both Warhol and Lichtenstein referenced the dot patterns used to mass-reproduce cartoons and photographs. But as much as this may have linked them in the collective imagination as the key figures of Pop Art, there were major differences between their careers. Not the least of these was the fact that Warhol became far more famous, largely due to the way he transformed the role of artist into a combination of celebrity, scene maker, and commercial entrepreneur.

Lichtenstein was more conventional, sticking to the studio and an interest in art history. He also made no distinction between his public and private selves, even as Warhol adopted a carefully crafted, enigmatic public persona. In other words, Lichtenstein’s view of what it meant to be an artist was fairly modest, best summed up by his observation that “most people think painters are kind of ridiculous, you know?”

Although both artists started out painting by hand, only Lichtenstein kept at it, while Warhol switched to the more mechanical medium of silkscreen. Ironically, he did so largely because his earlier facture was always being compared to Lichtenstein’s, who’d exhibited his paintings before Warhol managed to.

Undoubtedly Warhol left the bigger footprint art-historically. But Lichtenstein blazed an important trail of his own, creating a body of work that was as instantly recognizable and iconic as Warhol’s.

Compared with cops and superheroes, artists don’t appear on the big screen very frequently, but when they do, the results are often memorable. Dramas about art or artists can range from artist biopics to art-world satires, and as with just about any sort of story that gets the Hollywood treatment, accuracy takes a backseat to entertainment.

Still, if you’re a lover of art, there’s a lot to enjoy from this film genre, the best examples of which we’ve listed below.

Ruscha’s current retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art testifies to his achievements. Co-organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and on view through January 13, 2024, “Ed Ruscha/Now Then” offers a comprehensive overview of his multivalent practice, which includes painting, printmaking, drawing, bookmaking, and installation art. It reveals an artist with a cagey, deadpan sense of humor, whose focus on on the dialectic between reality and illusion eventually developed into a meditation on the American dream.

Throughout, Los Angeles, a city known for evanescent sunshine, movie magic, and all-pervasive freeways, remained Ruscha’s muse and touchstone, reflected in paintings and works on paper that are at once crisply delineated and mirage-like. Below, ARTnews revisits Ruscha’s life, art, and aesthetic vision through some of his best-known works.

Performance before and after midcentury was also distinguished by its increasing reliance on the camera, first for documentation, and later as an element integral to the work. The genre became increasingly bound up with photography, film, and video, which transformed a transitory medium into an art object after the fact.

Moreover, by the 1990s, film and video had achieved production values commensurate with mainstream movies, which had the effect of turning performance art into another form of cinematic mise-en-scène disconnected from live action in front of an audience.

The most salient development for performance art after 1950, though, was the sheer number of artists who embraced it. What follows, then, is a necessarily abridged account of this fascinating chapter in art history.

Read “The ARTnews Guide to Performance Art, Part One: 1700s–1920s” here.

Dalí’s legacy rested as much on the precedent he set for the artist as superstar brand (anticipating Warhol and Koons) as it did on his work. He also embodied the deleterious effects of such celebrity, becoming a caricature of himself whose antics and tendency to dump too much product into the market wound up diluting his art. More troubling was his flirtation with fascism during the 1930s, which cost him his place in the Surrealist circle.

Haring’s rapidly dashed-off combinations of hieroglyphics and coloring-book outlines epitomized these developments, as his work went from street to gallery and finally to the auction house, where it ultimately fetched millions of dollars. Cut down by AIDS in 1990 at age 31, he left behind a legend that rivaled Warhol’s and that of his coeval, Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Capturing lightning in a bottle, Haring reflected a cultural moment in New York that matched the louche glamor of Paris in the 1920s. Both milieus witnessed an influx of creatives prompted by larger historical forces: the aftermath of World War I for the French capital, and municipal bankruptcy for NYC during the 1970s, when white flight to the suburbs collapsed the city’s tax base. NYC became nearly as empty as its coffers, clearing a space for a tsunami of artistic aspirants—many of whom, ironically, were escaping suburbia, where they’d come of age amid the fruits of postwar prosperity and a firehose stream of television programming.

Thanks to television, Boomers grew up immersed in sitcoms, variety shows, dramas, commercials, and B-movies that introduced its impressionable audience to genres such as horror and sci-fi. Just as important, TV brought world-shattering events—JFK’s assassination, civil rights protests, the Vietnam War—into suburban living rooms. The result transformed images into a generationally shared shorthand.

It’s no surprise, then, that artists shaped by midcentury mass media—which also included rock-and-roll music and comic books—saw that the high-minded abstractions of 20th-century modernism had been exhausted after Conceptual Art and Minimalism, driving a return to representation. For Haring, this meant reviving a kind of Pop Art that was even more energetic and democratized than the original.

“Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody” will be on view at the Broad Museum, Los Angeles May 27–Oct. 8, 2023; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, from Nov. 11, 2023–Mar. 17, 2024; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, April 27–Sept. 8, 2024.

But while his efforts were initially lumped in with those of Pop artists Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and James Rosenquist, notably in curator Walter Hopps’s 1962 exhibition “New Paintings of Common Objects” at the Pasadena Art Museum, Thiebaud’s place in American art was something of a puzzle: On the one hand, his work spoke to the rampant consumerism occasioned by a postwar prosperity ignited by waves of returning veterans joining the middle class. On the other hand, his work didn’t deal with brands (as Warhol did with Campbell’s Soup and others) or the mass media. There was no way to read a implicit criticism of pop culture into Thiebaud’s canvases, the way one could with, say, a painting like Rosenquist’s F-111 (1964–65).

And then there was his technique. The effects of Thiebaud’s thick swirls of pigment were far removed from the slick facture of Warhol’s silkscreened paintings, Lichtenstein’s benday dots, and the broad, smooth brushwork that Rosenquist brought from his days as a commercial billboard painter.

Claes Oldenburg was, perhaps, the Pop artist who came closest to sharing Thiebaud’s sensibility. The subject matter of his “soft” sculptures—Brobdingnagian versions of quotidian objects stitched together from vinyl and stuffed with kapok fiber—often included foodstuffs such as hamburgers, French fries, and yes, slices of cake. But even here, the analogy with Thiebaud was imprecise.

The truth is, for all his associations with Pop Art, Thiebaud was really a kind of quirky realist, putting him in league with figurative artists such Alex Katz or Philip Pearlstein. More interestingly, Thiebaud’s oeuvre echoed that of another Northern California painter, Robert Bechtle, who, like Thiebaud, tuned in to the cultural reverberations of America’s booming suburbs.

A retrospective of Thiebaud’s work will be on view at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland, through May 21, 2023.