The faces of pop art

There's definitely not a human likeness to Robert Rauschenberg's painting of fellow artist Jasper Johns but, according to a new exhibition at the National Portait Gallery, it is a portrait.

Look a little more closely, and you can see why. There are no ears, eyes, or even a mouth or a nose, but through the use of various symbols and references, Rauschenberg summons up what curator Paul Moorhouse calls an "evocation of Johns".

And, sure enough, after a little while of searching out these visual clues, you can see that Johns is there.

What Pop Art Portraits sets out to show is how pop art inspired a "new kind of portraiture", reinvigorating the genre and influencing portraitists for decades to come. Many of the portraits in the early part of the exhibition - the likes of Lichtenstein, Warhol, Johns, Caulfield and Hockney - are a reaction against abstraction.

These artists were, according to Moorhouse, "suspicious of falling into the trap of painting in the old abstract expressionist way."

And so, like Rauschenberg, sought new ways to present likenesses of people.

The exhibition is littered with famous faces by famous artists. But one of the most striking rooms in the show is that which deals with the mood change of the 1960s, and its effect on pop art.

British pop artist Gerald Laing says that what drove the movement in the early 60s was a desire to "sweep everything away and getting it right this time".

He describes a sense of optimism which fuelled artists, and refers to the "different sociological conditions" in which artists on both sides of the Atlantic were producing work.

He described the Britain of the time as "socially repressed and economically depressed" and points to the influence of American consumer culture on the British leg of pop art.

This period is marked by iconic works such as Laing's own comment on space travel, a symbol of hope and exploration (pictured above, right), Peter Blake's, The 1962 Beatles and, on the American side of the Atlantic, Warhol's Double Elvis.

But, Laing says, "by the 60s the whole thing had collapsed". The sense of hope and anticipation was washed away by a series of social and political adversities: Marilyn's suicide, JFK's assassination and the Vietnam war, to name a few.

The exhibition captures this transition, and how it influenced pop art in the 1960s, in a room devoted to Marilyn Monroe - with works by Richard Hamilton, Pauline Boly, Claes Oldenurg, Richard Smith and, of course, Andy Warhol.

All depict Marilyn in vastly different ways, but all become similar in one striking respect: Marilyn's death marks a turning point in the culture of the 1960s and in pop art, a shift from innocence to experience.

Marilyn was found dead in 1962 - the cause of death "probable suicide". Warhols series of black and white stills of Marilyn (from the film Niagra), which are metamorphosed with layers of colour, appear masklike, suggesting her private person and public persona - a depiction which Moorhouse describes as, "not simply celebratory... but beautiful and also deeply disturbing."

"Nemesis," Moorhouse suggests "replaces optimism".

The sense of shattered hope continues, later, moving on to Richard Hamilton's Swingeing London 67 (a) which depicts Mick Jagger after a drugs bust - celebrity reduced to common villain (a version of this painting is also currently on show in the Hayward's painting of modern life exhibition).

Pop Art Portraits runs from 11 October 2007 to 20 January 2008 at the National Portrait Gallery in London. For tickets call 0870 013 0703

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