'A Decade of Pop Prints and Multiples, 1962 to 1972: The Frank Mitzel Collection'

Opens at MCASD Nov 20, 2025 – May 24, 2026

A Campbell’s soup can, a Phillips 66 sign and even a light bulb are easily recognizable images of a mid-century art movement called Pop that challenged the traditions of fine art by using imagery from popular and mass culture.

"A Decade of Pop Prints and Multiples, 1962–1972: The Frank Mitzel Collection" marks the public debut of Southern California-based collector Frank Mitzel’s gift of more than sixty Pop Art prints to the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Assembled by Mitzel over the course of three decades, this vibrant collection offers an impressive and valuable survey of Pop’s growth across the United States, England, and Europe during an era of rapid transformation. Pop Art emerged in London and New York in the mid-to late 1950s in response to the simultaneous exuberance and unease of the postwar period.

© 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris , Photography: Pablo Mason

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MCASD

“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,” explained Senior Curator Jill Dawsey. Pop artists then turned to advertising and mass media, embracing bright hues, flat graphics, and rapid legibility.

“In our own moment of heightened spectacle and media saturation, Pop’s commercial imagery may evoke nostalgia for the products of years past; Coca-Cola, Marlboro, Phillips 66 gasoline, and Campbell’s soup all appear in the Mitzel Collection,” added Dawsey.

The Mitzel Collection bolsters MCASD’s existing holdings of artworks by Richard Artschwager, Christo, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, and Niki de Saint Phalle. It also introduces several new figures—especially from the heyday of British Pop, such as Peter Blake, Richard Hamilton, Gerald Laing, and Joe Tilson—not to mention the Icelandic-born, Paris-based Erró. The focused compendium of prints and multiples that Mitzel assembled tells a fuller and more nuanced story of Pop Art, and with it, of an eventful era.

“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,” Dawsey added.

© 2025 James Rosenquist Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Photography: Pablo Mason

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MCASD

Mitzel, a future landscape designer, was born in Detroit in 1958 and began collecting Pop Art in 1990, around the time his husband, Bob Babboni (d. 2016), retired and the couple moved to San Diego. Living in proximity to Los Angeles and its galleries, and traveling frequently with Babboni, Mitzel developed a keen interest in Pop. He launched an informal but rigorous self-education, reading extensively and befriending a Los Angeles art dealer who shared guidance and insight. Drawn to Pop’s visual language—derived from comic strips, television, and consumer goods—Mitzel recognized echoes of his youth.

“I’m a boomer,” he says with a laugh. Mitzel was also primed to appreciate Pop through his exposure to mid-century U.S. literature, particularly that of the Beat generation.

A colorful catalog for the exhibition, produced by MCASD, is available at the Shop@MCASD and includes an insightful essay by MCASD Senior Curator Jill Dawsey entitled, "Fast Cars and Open Roads: The Frank Mitzel Collection," which introduces the exhibition.

VISIT: MCASD La Jolla, 700 Prospect St, La Jolla, 92037 / www.mcasd.org