TIME: Almanac 1995

home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search

/ TIME: Almanac 1995 / TIME Almanac 1995.iso / time / 081693 / 0816400.000 < prev next >

Wrap

Text File | 1994-03-25 | 7.9 KB | 155 lines

<text id=93TT0219> <title> Aug. 16, 1993: When the Easel Went POP </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1993 Aug. 16, 1993 Overturning The Reagan Era </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> ART, Page 54 When the Easel Went POP </hdr> <body> The explosive arrival of the mass media into painting in the late '50s was not so radical as it seems By ROBERT HUGHES Not another Pop Art show? Yes, but an interesting one, with a few fresh points to make about what is, with the sole exception of Abstract Expressionism, the most relentlessly publicized and interminably discussed movement in American art. "Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition, 1955-1962" was conceived and curated for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and is now, through Oct. 3, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. It is worth seeing for two reasons. First, it puts together a number of American paintings from the late '50s and early '60s, the hatching years of Pop art, that haven't been seen in public in a generation. The early Rauschenbergs alone, for instance, make the visit worthwhile. The second reason has to do with origins. Nestled deep inside the usual version of modern American art history lies the idea of a big break between Pop art and Abstract Expressionism. A new, cool generation, appearing in the early '60s, declared the fervor of Ab-Ex, New York's heroic style, to be irrelevant. Instead of "authentic" art, there was kitsch; instead of the swooping gestures of De Kooning, the icy mechanics of Andy Warhol's silk-screen reproductions; instead of Pollock's loops and skeins of thrown paint, the inert writhings of James Rosenquist's Franco-American spaghetti, rendered billboard-size. Instant communication, not reflection; in place of the "deep" image, the smiling and banal glare of American commercial culture. But the change wasn't so simple as that. Intricate aesthetic ambitions lay at the heart of at least some Pop art and mattered greatly to the slightly older artists, such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, who were linked to it but not part of it. Meanwhile, some of Pop's traits were forecast in the work of artists who matured in the early '50s, the high classic years of Abstract Expressionism. The revolt of younger artists against older ones is one of the favorite narratives of popular art history, but it is almost always an exaggeration. Pop art didn't just appear; in a clean break with the immediate American past, it grew. It grew partly from mass media but also, and just as importantly, from an art world saturated with Abstract Expressionist devices, many of which Pop used. The sons cleaved to the fathers, even when dreaming of killing or at least superseding them. Such is the argument of this show, and on the whole it's well made. One could have wished for a longer line of evidence--Willem de Kooning, for instance, was collaging bits of cigarette advertisements into his paintings as far back as 1950, and the roots of American Pop actually go back to Stuart Davis and Charles Demuth in the '20s. And there is one absurd inclusion, that of Cy Twombly, whose elegant scribbles have no relation to Pop. But to see works like Grace Hartigan's exuberant Billboard, 1957, an abstraction based on photographs from LIFE magazine, is to realize how mass-media sources were diffused in the air of the late '50s, ready to precipitate--as they did in the work of Larry Rivers, Johns and Rauschenberg, closely followed by such young Turks as Rosenquist, Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein and Warhol, including the Los Angeles artist Edward Ruscha, whose early-'60s word paintings are extraordinarily strong. The cardinal sin of Pop, in the eyes of its early detractors, was to isolate what had seemed to be the marks and stigmata of sincerity in painting and to treat them as style. It thus undermined the most cherished assumption of the New York School: unmediated expression and direct experience were a) possible and b) desirable. In doing so, it opened the board to the irritable fascination with coding--the devices by which painting becomes painting and through which images are released--that still haunts American painting. Pop became the common coin of smart art, enclosing everything it did in a frame of as-ifs and quotation marks. This habit has now become the mark of a glumly mistrustful, fin-de-siecle period style that seems at least as fixed and repetitive as the mannerisms of late Abstract Expressionism, but 30 years ago, it was fresh and edgy. It could also be quite funny. The idea of "a new start" is written all over Lichtenstein's Sponge II, 1962, as the hand with the sponge wipes away Lichtenstein's own trademark, the Benday dots, leaving an empty canvas. There is no more succinct comment on the much vaunted virility of the Abstract Expressionist brushstroke than Johns' Painting with Two Balls, and when Johns took a studio broom, slathered it in paint and pinned it to the surface of his painting Fool's House, he was clearly guying the cult of the big strokes left by house-painters' brushes, which was so much a feature of the preceding generation's art. Whatever looks spontaneous in Johns' work from the late '50s and early '60s was a parody of spontaneity. Much the same attitude was struck by Rauschenberg when, in 1957, he produced two collage paintings named Factum I and Factum II, each with the same photo image of trees, the same pictures of President Eisenhower under the same veil of muslin, the same pages from a calendar--and the same splots and drips of paint in the same places. Chance, he was suggesting, might be repeatable. And yet, although the two Factums have always been treated as his critique of spontaneity, the fact is that they are not exactly the same; the drips and swipes are subtly different, as anyone can see when the pictures are viewed side by side, as they were meant to be (and are not in this show, which has only one of them). So the spontaneity is both feigned and real, the duplication both desired and denied. Rauschenberg's early work vividly illustrates how he (like other younger artists at the time, among them Larry Rivers) drew on a filial relationship to Ab-Ex, oscillating between devotion and aggression. Still, "to start every day moving out from Pollock and De Kooning," Rauschenberg once remarked, was "a long way to have to go to start from," especially for an artist of his own ecumenical, magpie temperament. His combine paintings in the '50s reflected Kurt Schwitters' omnivorousness and Joseph Cornell's sweet, cool nostalgia too; but the sense of urgency, the Whitmanesque energy, was very American and particularly Rauschenberg's own. I like this, you can almost hear him saying, and this, and this, and that--all ands, no buts. This effusiveness is what still gives delight in Pop art 25 years after the initial surprise (and hoopla) began to wear off. The work of Rosenquist and Oldenburg is utterly imbued with it. Rosenquist's President Elect, 1960-61--the first of his billboard-style pictures--forms a con tinuous American dream book, a gleaming panorama of hope and anxiety: history painting in the making. And no matter how many times you may have seen the gaudily painted plaques from Oldenburg's "store" show of 1961, the stockings and muumuus and tights slathered in drippy enamel, they remain as vivid and grossly comic as they ever were, conveying the wonder with which, as the artist once wrote, he went through the Lower East Side of New York, sampling the stores "as if they were museums." The main pleasures of Pop come out of an immersion in life as it was lived then, and the excitement it memorializes is something that no scholarly essay seems quite able, so far, to convey. </body> </article> </text>