The extraordinary vitality of the sixties, it's imprint on the modern way of life in many areas – visual arts, architecture, design, music and cinema – is put together in the exhibition of 500 Pop art creations of the swinging early sixties in the Pompidou Center. The exhibition spans the period between 1956 to 1968 from the first pop art exhibition in London called "This is Tomorrow" until the years of social protests in Europe and the USA. Visual artists from three countries are the most creative of the epoch: France (with Arman, Christo, Tinguel, César, Niki St. Phalle, Yves Klein, Jacques Monory, Gérard Deschamps), USA (with Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Dick Tracy, Tom Wesselmann, James Rosenquist, and others who were more of a neo-dada inspiration such as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Robert Indiana and Larry Rivers), and Britain (such as David Hockney, Peter Blake, Allen Jones and Archigram). In addition, architects are represented (e.g. Smithson, who designed the "The House of the Future", Cedric Price, Walter Jonas and Joan Littlewood), as well as fashion designers who were part of this art movement (Pierre Cardin, André Courrèges, Paco Rabanne, Yves Saint Laurent and Mary Quant). There are also allusions to two famous Pop Art venues: Warhol's "Factory" and Claus Oldenberg's "The Store", as well as films of the epoch such as the "Vinyl" of Warhol. And music is everywhere (by John Cage, La Monte Young or Pierre Henry, and rock/pop with Jefferson Airplane, the Mamas and Papas, Beach Boys, Lou Reed, and of course the most popular of all, the Beatles).
Allow yourself extra time to also see the wonderful museum of Modern Art on the fourth floor.

POP Art and the Swinging 60's

Whether you are a sixties teenager or a youngster today, this exhibition takes you back to the days when the youth became the kings of the western hemisphere, whose favor many an industrial giant coveted and whose creativity fascinated and may I say changed the world, or at least the western world.

But if you come from another planet and happen to land on Earth finding John Chamberlain's "Hillbilly Galoot", a 1960's sculpture that looks like the carcass of a wrecked car, or Arman's 1961 "Chopin's Waterloo", you may think that you are in front of the wreckage of a spaceship belonging to an advanced civilization that made an emergency landing on Earth.

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