ART

The Instant Nostalgia of Pop

Pop art reflects the times. It is an ex- and “life,” has turned out to be the
pression of a society that puts less em- merest jive. It could hardly be expected
phasis on breeding, formal education and to convince anyone in a world where
even wealth than on presentation ... It is Lichtensteins cost $50,000 apiece.
a chic open to everyone, and qualifications There is no longer any difficulty in
for entry can be acquired as easily as seeing the best of pop as a mannered
learning the latest dance fad. game with art language, rather than a
vulgarian’s assault on le beau et le bien.
Thus, in 1965, the director of the Phil- Ten years ago, Art Historian Robert
adelphia Institute for Contemporary Art, Rosenblum predicted that “the initially
Samuel Green, took the pratfall from the unsettling imagery of pop art will quickly
ivory tower in a preface to the world’s be dispelled by the numbing effects of
first book on pop art, an emetically ex- iconographical familiarity, and ephem-
travagant volume by a writer named eral or enduring pictorial values will be-
John Rublowsky. Yet who today shall say come explicit.”
he was not right? By 1965 pop had be- And so it happened. During the late
come the most popular movement in ’60s, much was written to show how
American art history, drenched in bally- pop, in its tendency toward large formats,
hoo, gratefully supported by legions of taut plain surfaces, heraldic forms and
collectors whose appetites bore the same flat color, had its resemblances to min-
relation to connoisseurship that TV din- imal abstraction. This has a germ of
ners do to poulet en demi-deuil. Warhol, truth. A Lichtenstein like Blam, for in-
Lichtenstein, Indiana, Rosenquist, Wessel- stance, has more in common with a geo-
mann, Oldenburg, Johns and Rauschen- metrical painting by Frank Stella than it,
berg became instant household names, or the Stella, has with a De Kooning. SIGN-SYSTEMS
not counting their swarm of epigones. But, as Alloway insists, what really Clockwise from right:
“What we have with the pop artists,” mattered in pop was not its formal devices Andy Warhol’s “Marilyn
wrote the English critic Lawrence Allo- but its imagery. “Pop art,” he argues. Monroe Diptych” (1962);
way, “is a situation in which success has “is neither abstract nor realistic, though Jasper Johns’
been combined with misunderstanding.” it has contacts in both directions. The “Three Flags” (1958);
He had coined the term pop art, in Eng- core of pop art is at neither frontier. It Robert Rauschenberg’s
land in 1957, “to refer approvingly to is, essentially, an art about signs and “Monogram” (1959);
the product of the mass media.” Appro- sign-systems.” Ed Ruscha’s “Honk” (1962);
priately, Alloway, whose fascination with Inclusive Monsters. An art that ad- Roy Lichtenstein’s
mass culture as anthropology long pred- dressed itself with cool and cunning to “Blam” (1962)
ates the movement that he christened, the nature of signs was unfamiliar in the
has now organized a pop retrospective at early ’60s. Thus a Jasper Johns like Three
Manhattan’s Whitney Museum. Flags, 1958, was—and still is—madden-
In a weird way, this show exhales as ing in the questions that it puts. Just
musty and involuntary a breath of van- what are these three canvases, one glued
ished time as any revival of neoclassi- to the next? American flags are made of
cism. Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup cloth; can one imagine an American flag
can, once considered an icon of intimid- made of paint? And if there were an
ating cool, has become a sort of mad- American flag made of paint, would it sionism. No longer; the threatening air is America’s justification of Baudelaire’s thought démodé and elitist now reasserts ness is not deceptive; it is just obvious.
eleine. Irrevocably, the cachet of pop has be a flag, or a painting, or both, or of the tire-girdled animal has gone, and remark that “genius is nothing more or less itself: for instance, that a posture of cool And Ramos, whose Batmen and Playboy
gone, and many of its artifacts now look neither? And is a flag made of paint a the residue is like a culmination of the than childhood recovered at will—a child- boredom can in itself become boring; Bunnies go as far as pop ever went in
tenuous. It cannot be long before some painting of a flag, or does the fact of its collage tradition in modern art. “There hood now equipped for self-expression.” that a perfunctory infatuation with the unctuous, opportunistic triviality, seems
enterprising museum (the Metropolitan?) being painted return it to the realm of is no reason,” Rauschenberg once re- Johns and Rauschenberg, then, and signs and portents of “masscult” means to be in the show merely to illustrate an
opens a ’60s Period Room, to go with pure abstract design? The rendering of marked, “not to consider the world as Oldenburg, and some Warhol, a good nothing unless it is subjected—as by amusing feedback loop between pop and
its transplanted Louis Quinze paneling such a configuration in paint contrives in one gigantic painting.” deal of Lichtenstein and a few pieces by Oldenburg—to a profound change and commercial art. In 1962, at the peak of
and reassembled colonial parlor: a an extremely subtle way to change its His combines of junk, photos and paint Rosenquist and (surprisingly enough, in rethinking; that banality is not always the Batman revival, Ramos got some
Wesselmann and a Warhol Marilyn on symbolism. For it will now attract closer betoken a Rabelaisian generosity in the view of his calamitous recent work) by imaginative bliss. And if one happens to mileage from painting the masked hero
the stainless-steel walls, a coffee table attention than any flag normally gets. face of that world—art as an affable Jim Dine: such are the survivors. The find sense in these propositions, it is hard of Bob Kane’s comic strip. Four years
strewn with multiples and macadamia Johns’ surface takes care of that—an bombardment. There are no “Irrelevant” losers are more numerous. to take all that seriously the marginal later, a Batman comic returned the com-
nuts, a Panther poster above the vinyl even, sumptuous, almost edible skin of details in a Rauschenberg combine, and Banality and Bliss. When pop was at its artists whose work Alloway has selected. pliment by illustrating a pop exhibition
settee, and under the supergraphic in the wax encaustic, so full of nuances and his belief that “there is nothing that height in the early ’60s, it seemed that Their work may have this or that to do in the Gotham City museum; on the wall
corner a waxwork group of Henry textural incidents that the eye travels everything is subservient to” became of nearly every young painter in America with signs, but on aesthetic grounds it were paintings clearly meant to look like
Geldzahler hustling that week’s trend to every inch of it with relish. A real flag immense importance to later pop artists. was churning out his or her cigarette pack- varies between limpness and indulgent Ramos’ own.
a slim, wrinkled matron in bandoleers is a sign, which can only be stared at; That article of faith connects to Olden- ets, car grilles, Mickey Mice and talking kitsch, typified by the show’s California Despite these and other longueurs, this
and Courrèges boots. these painted flags become an image, burg’s art in an obvious way, for Olden- Coke bottles. The result was a babel to contingent, Joe Goode, Ed Ruscha and is a worthy show. Alloway has suc-
Pending such feats of instant nostalgia, which demands to be studied. burg too wished to reject nothing: electric surpass the ceaseless yammer of neons in Mel Ramos. ceeded where many previous critics
all we are left with is the pictures. The If Johns was pop’s laureate of aes- fans or fried eggs, toilets and Chrysler Times Square. The problem of how to Goode’s constructed fragments of stair- failed, by clarifying the issues of pop
crass cultural chauvinism and blatant thetic doubt, Rauschenberg and Olden- airflows, lipsticks and drum sets—all survive in this battering surplus of gratu- cases are among the emptiest works of and reminding us that the time of gener-
flackery that surrounded and fed Amer- burg were (and are) its monsters of in- were subjected to bewildering change, itous images became acute for the serious art ever to travel east of the Rockies, and alization is past. There is no honest way
ican pop have not by any means gone clusiveness. Rauschenberg’s Monogram, robbed of their identity, skinned and artist, especially when the public became Ruscha’s variations on the painted word- of rejecting or accepting the whole of
from the art scene, but they are muted. 1959, once seemed a perverse resuscita- stuffed and softened, arrogantly rescaled surfeited by having its quotidian environ- as-object, which derive from Jasper pop, but it is useful to note how its good
All the talk about how pop meant a demo- tion of Dada, with the blots and smears in what now looks like a monumental ment rammed back down its throat, lub- Johns, are so cute that Alloway’s normal works survive as aesthetic objects and
cratization of the art experience, how it of paint on the Angora goat’s nose form- recapitulation of the child’s primal will ricated by an arty sauce. eloquence is reduced to calling them “de- not brassy manifestoes of Yankee ma-
would obliterate the line between “art” ing a cruel parody of abstract expres- to dominate his surroundings. Oldenburg The truth of certain maxims once ceptively obvious.” In fact, their obvious- terialism. ■ Robert Hughes

80 TIME, APRIL 15, 1974 TIME, APRIL 15, 1974 81