Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego

A Decade of Pop Prints and Multiples, 1962–1972: The Frank Mitzel Collection opens November 20 at MCASD

When collector Frank Mitzel moved to Southern California in 1990, his fascination with Pop took hold. Over thirty years, Mitzel built a collection of more than sixty Pop prints and multiples, spanning the movement’s rise across the U.S., U.K., and Europe between 1962 and 1972. From Andy Warhol's fascination with consumer imagery to the sleek compositions of James Rosenquist and the provocative symbolism of Richard Hamilton, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns, the Mitzel Collection, generously gifted to the Museum, allows MCASD to tell a fuller and more nuanced story of Pop art.

A Collector with a Pop Sensibility

Growing up in Detroit during the height of postwar consumer culture, Mitzel was drawn to Pop’s bright colors and its embrace of everyday life. “I’m a boomer,” he told MCASD Senior Curator Jill Dawsey with a laugh, recalling the comic strips, television, and advertising that shaped his visual world.

After moving to San Diego in 1990, Mitzel undertook an informal but rigorous self-education on Pop, reading extensively and forming a friendship with a Los Angeles art dealer who provided guidance and insight.

But Mitzel’s draw to Pop also came from his early exposure to literature greats. In the 1980s, Mitzel accompanied his aunt, Frankie Edith (“Edie”) Kerouac-Parker, whose first husband was writer Jack Kerouac, on visits with William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg—encounters that connected him to the legacy of the Beat generation. Although he viewed the Beats as distinct from the Pop artists, Mitzel recognized a shared goal: both wanted their work to reflect the times in which they lived.

“They wanted everyday life, in color.”
– Frank Mitzel

Mitzel’s collection reflects both his personal story and Pop’s diversity: it’s witty and subversive, glamorous and political, filled with camp humor and cultural critique.

Pop: Art for Everyone

In the 1960s, artists turned the tools of mass production into the language of fine art. Andy Warhol embraced screenprinting to mirror consumer culture, even printing his famous Campbell’s soup cans on paper shopping bags; Roy Lichtenstein drew from romance comics and war cartoons alike, pointing to the coexistence of sentimentality and aggression in U.S. culture; and British Pop artists like Richard Hamilton and Joe Tilson examined America’s exported dreams from across the Atlantic.

Pop art quickly became an icon of the postwar era’s deeply democratic aspirations. Pop prints, especially, allowed artists to reach wider audiences and blur the lines between high art and everyday life—becoming as MCASD’s Senior Curator explains “truly popular.”

Snapshots of a Transformative Decade

Pop’s familiar icons—Coca-Cola, Marlboro, Phillips 66, Campbell’s soup—appear throughout the Mitzel Collection, and today they may feel nostalgic. But these works were once far more provocative. Lichtenstein’s romance and war imagery and James Rosenquist’s mix of fighter jet motifs with a young girl reveal the tensions around domestic life and the military-industrial complex.

The turbulent era is echoed in pieces like Robert Rauschenberg’s Poster for CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), created as the nation reeled from President Kennedy’s assassination, and Hamilton’s Kent State, drawn directly from televised news of Vietnam-era violence. By contrast, Rosenquist’s later Flower Garden (1972) hints toward the decade’s emerging optimism, recasting a rare early image of a female athlete as a symbol of the coming push for gender equity and the spirit that would soon lead to Title IX.

MCASD’s Growing Pop Art Identity

A Decade of Pop Prints and Multiples, 1962–1972, also tells part of MCASD’s own story. In the 1960s, the Museum (then the La Jolla Museum of Art) began defining its focus on contemporary work — with a particular eye toward California artists.

Now, with Mitzel’s generous gift, MCASD’s collection of Pop art expands dramatically, allowing MCASD’s collection to tell a more in-depth story of Pop art—and the eventful era in which it took shape.

Adapted from “Fast Cars and Open Roads: The Frank Mitzel Collection,” by Jill Dawsey, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 2025.