Recognition and Reportage

Abstract In this text, Maurizio Calvesi, a leading interpreter in the 1960s of contemporary American Pop art for the Italian audience, challenges the common European reading of Pop art as a negative critique of US capitalist society. He argues that Pop art does not represent a “true” reality, but rather mimics a new process of image production. For this reason, he refers particularly to transactional psychology in order to explain the works of Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein, and proposes a positive alternative to the usual focus on the consumerist iconography of Pop art.