MCASD Unveils Major Pop Art Collection

The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego is opening A Decade of Pop Prints and Multiples, 1962-1972: The Frank Mitzel Collection, marking the public debut of over sixty Pop Art prints gifted by Southern California collector Frank Mitzel.

If you’ve been waiting for a comprehensive look at Pop Art’s growth across the United States, England, and Europe during its most transformative decade, this exhibition delivers exactly that.

The Collection’s Significance

Mitzel assembled this collection over three decades, focusing specifically on Pop Art’s heyday when artists were embracing printmaking as a democratic medium to reach broad audiences.

Senior Curator Jill Dawsey explains: “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.”

The collection includes easily recognizable imagery – Campbell’s soup cans, Phillips 66 signs, light bulbs – all rendered in the bright hues, flat graphics, and rapid legibility that defined Pop Art’s challenge to traditional fine art.

These artists turned to advertising and mass media for inspiration, creating work that simultaneously celebrated and critiqued consumer culture.

What Makes This Collection Different

The Mitzel Collection bolsters MCASD’s existing holdings of works by Richard Artschwager, Christo, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, and Niki de Saint Phalle. But it also introduces several new figures – especially from British Pop’s heyday, including Peter Blake, Richard Hamilton, Gerald Laing, and Joe Tilson – plus the Icelandic-born, Paris-based Erró.

Dawsey notes the collection’s range: “In spite of its focus on a single art movement and a single decade, the Mitzel Collection is remarkably wide-ranging, reminding us that Pop Art itself was multifaceted, like the culture that inspired it.”

The Collector Behind It

Frank Mitzel, a landscape designer born in Detroit in 1958, started collecting Pop Art in 1990 around the time his husband Bob Babboni retired and the couple moved to San Diego.

Living near Los Angeles and its galleries, traveling frequently, Mitzel developed a keen interest in Pop through self-education – reading extensively and befriending an LA art dealer who provided guidance and insight.

Drawn to Pop’s visual language derived from comic strips, television, and consumer goods, Mitzel recognized echoes of his own youth as a boomer. His exposure to mid-century US literature, particularly Beat generation writing, primed him to appreciate Pop’s cultural significance beyond just aesthetics.

Why It Resonates Now

In our current moment of heightened spectacle and media saturation, Pop’s commercial imagery evokes nostalgia for products of years past.

Coca-Cola, Marlboro, Phillips 66 gasoline, Campbell’s soup – all appear in the Mitzel Collection, reminding us of an era when consumer culture was just beginning to dominate American life in the way it does now.

The exhibition’s chronology also coincides with a formative era for MCASD itself. In the 1960s, when these prints were created, the Art Center (as it was then known) debuted new gallery spaces and formally became the La Jolla Museum of Art, acquiring work by artists of national and international renown.

A colorful catalog produced by MCASD is available at Shop@MCASD, featuring an essay by Senior Curator Jill Dawsey titled “Fast Cars and Open Roads: The Frank Mitzel Collection.”