The Frank Mitzel Collection is a gift to the La Jolla museum of more than 60 pop art prints from 1962 to 1972, representing mass culture’s growth.
From exuberant pieces to thoughtful works, an assemblage of pop art imagery has arrived in La Jolla to challenge the traditions of fine art in a new exhibit.
Niki de Saint Phalle, ‘My Love, My Love’, 1968
“A Decade of Pop Prints and Multiples, 1962 to 1972: The Frank Mitzel Collection” opened Nov 20 at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego on Prospect Street, the public debut of Southern California-based collector Frank Mitzel’s gift to the institution.
More than 60 pop art prints, including recognizable items like a Campbell’s soup can, a Phillips 66 sign and a light bulb, showcase a cultural era marked by rapid transformation in a postwar period.
Assembled by Mitzel over the course of three decades, the collection offers a survey of pop’s growth across the US, England and Europe.
Andy Warhol, ‘Flowers’, 1964
“Pop artists were among the first to embrace printmaking specifically as a democratic medium, one that enabled them to reach broad audiences — and thus was truly popular — while courting associations with the commercial culture that inspired the work,” MCASD senior curator Jill Dawsey said in a press release.
The Mitzel Collection bolsters MCASD’s existing holdings of artworks by Richard Artschwager, Christo, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg and Niki de Saint Phalle. It also introduces several new figures such as Peter Blake, Richard Hamilton, Gerald Laing and Joe Tilson.
Joe Tilson, ‘Cut Out and Send’, 1968
Though only focusing on a single art movement over a single decade, the Mitzel Collection is “remarkably wide-ranging, reminding us that pop art itself was multifaceted, like the culture that inspired it,” Dawsey said.
Mitzel, a future landscape designer, was born in Detroit in 1958 and began collecting pop art in 1990, around the time his late husband, Bob Babboni, retired and the couple moved to San Diego.
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