‘Switched On’
British Pop Artists, 1950–70
James KingA vibrant history of British Pop Art and its social roots
‘Switched On’ is the first full-length history of British Pop Art, the movement that transformed the visual culture of post-war Britain and helped define the spirit of the 1960s. Through the lives and work of artists such as Eduardo Paolozzi, Peter Blake, Richard Hamilton and Pauline Boty, it reveals a movement shaped not only by mass media and consumer culture but by class, aspiration and social change. Set against the vibrant world of Swinging London, this book reconstructs a landscape populated by pop stars, film icons, wrestlers and fashion models, and shows how art and popular culture together reshaped modern Britain.
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This new volume brings a fresh voice to the subject. Extremely readable and well informed, by focussing on the early careers of the artists it opens up the subject and captures the spirit of the time as Britain emerged from post-war austerity into a new age.
'Richard Riley, curator
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Meticulously researched and with a visual and conceptual analysis of the many forms of Pop Art devised in Great Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, ‘Switched On’ is humanised and enriched by the biographical back stories of each of the sixteen artists taken as the core of the movement. This well-argued survey, written in accessible and refreshingly straightforward language, is a welcome and essential addition to the literature on the movement.
'Marco Livingstone, author of Pop Art: A Continuing History
Introduction
1 Intimations (1950–52)
2 Inaugurations (1952–6)
3 Reverberations (1956–61)
4 The Reluctant Pop Artist
5 Queer Pop
6 ‘Young Contemporaries’ (1961)
7 Pop Goes the Easel (1962)
8 Aftereffects (1962–4)
9 The Latecomers
10 Pop at the Slade and St Martin’s
11 Femmes Fatales, Pop Singers and Wrestlers (1962–5)
12 Pin-Ups
13 The Shadow of Wittgenstein (1965)
14 Swinging London (1966)
15 Twists and Turns (1964–8)
16 Swingeing London and the Last Days of Pop (1966–9)
17 Post-1970
References
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
Index
James King is Professor Emeritus of English at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His previous books include Paul Nash: Designer and Illustrator (2022) and ‘Our Little Gang’: The Lives of the Vorticists (Reaktion, 2025).
