ARTS: Painting Pop at Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, is the "must-see show of the summer"

This exciting celebration of British pop art from the early 1960s gathers together work from major collections at the Tate, the Government Art Collection and the National Portrait Gallery, with the focus on and around 1962 - described as "a pivotal year" for pop art in Britain.

"There are 29 works on show, with key sixties pop culture artists including David Hockney, Peter Blake, Pauline Boty and Allen Jones," said Helen Watson, programming director for Lakeland Arts, who has described Painting Pop as "the must-see show of the summer".

"It is a really interesting time for art. They were engaging with issues of the time - the space race, celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, Buddy Holly and The Beatles.

"The future was a scary thing, with the Cuban Missile Crisis. The future is a scary thing now. So the art from that time resonates with us now.

"Pauline Boty described it, in the 1960s, as 'nostalgia for the now', and we are now looking back at that, rather than to our own future or now."

Boty's beautiful portrait of Marilyn Monroe adorns the exhibition poster. Now largely forgotten, the Royal College of Art graduate was a friend of pop artists such as Hockney, and died in 1966, aged just 28. Her captivating oil painting of the American actress - Colour Her Gone - is shown alongside other important works from public and private collections.

Curator Charu Vallabhbhai told the Gazette: "We chose to focus on the early years of pop art because 1962 is a really significant year.

"It was the year Abbot Hall opened to the public, and it was also the year a film called Pop Goes the Easel came out, directed by Ken Russell, which focused on four of the artists we have here: Peter Blake, Peter Phillips, Pauline Boty and Derek Boshier.

"It was art that was engaging with events of the time. They were living in a year when there was a lot going on in the world.

"This exhibition brings the work by them and their contemporaries together and really shows us it was a year when a lot of genre-breaking work was made."

Charu continued: "These really young artists, just out of art school, were being so productive and pushing things forward. There was a buzz about what they were involved in.

"People are interested in this era at the moment. We are at a time where there have been 50-year anniversaries of parts of sixties culture, for example the recent anniversary of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper.

"There is a resonance between then and now. They had the Cuban Missile Crisis, we have the issues in Korea with them talking about ballistic missiles being launched. It means something to people."

Works by leading artists who have made "a significant contribution to the development of 20th century and contemporary art practice" are on show. There are loans from the Tate collection by Allen Jones and David Hockney, as well as Richard Hamilton’s painting of John F Kennedy peering from behind a space helmet.

To complement Painting Pop, Abbot Hall is also showing Hockney's complete print series A Rake's Progress, inspired by a trip to a New York and featuring a semi-autobiographical character.

Accompanying the exhibition will be an events programme of talks, live music and family-friendly activities. Painting Pop is open daily until October 7. For more, visit abbothall.org.uk