The National Portrait Gallery is to stage its first exhibition devoted to Pop Art - including works by Bradford artist David Hockney.

Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns and Ray Johnson will also be represented alongside works by other British luminaries such as Sir Peter Blake.

One room of the exhibition will be a "secular chapel" devoted to Marilyn Monroe.

The gallery will recreate the famous 1967 tribute show, Homage to Marilyn Monroe, held at the Sydney Janis Gallery in New York.

Several of the original works will be reunited in London - among them Warhol's famous screenprints.

The Marilyn room is intended to illustrate "the way Pop portraits transformed familiar images into works of art of great technical virtuosity, lasting originality and enduring fascination".

The show, Pop Art Portraits, has been conceived as a "visual dialogue" between US and British Pop Art.

It will examine the artists' fascination with depicting the famous, using images taken from advertising, pop music, cinema and print.

In all there are 52 key works by 28 artists working on both sides of the Atlantic during the 1950s and 1960s.

Highlights include a Warhol self-portrait, Lichtenstein's iconic In The Car and Ray Johnson's proto-Pop portraits of James Dean and Elvis Presley, plus rarely seen portraits by Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist and Robert Indiana.

The show will run from October 11 to January 20.

It will be divided into six sections: Precursors of Pop, Portraits and the Question of Style, Fantasy, Film, Innocence and Experience, and Marilyn.

e-mail: newsdesk@bradford.newsquest.co.uk

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