Screen test: Scott Rothkopf on Jeff Koons's Olive Oyl

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FAR FROM POPEYE'S NATIVE TURF, OLIVE OYL BEGAN IN A CAPE TOWN HARBOR, where Koons snapped the boat photograph seen above. Taking an interest in the tires that adorn the vessel's hull, he paired the industrial seascape with a child's pool toy. This first "sketch" soon led him to a seafaring Popeye, framed in a roundel on the cover of a comic book, and thus the central formal and thematic motifs of the painting were fused. Still, Popeye's voyage into paint was hardly simple. First Koons meticulously silhouetted the waves to form a playful link between the painting's representational registers. Then he retouched the cover's surface cracks in Photoshop. The image above at the far right betrays this process, since the portions of the cover that would remain visible in the final composition are smooth, while those that would later be obscured retain their original imperfections. Here one glimpses the tracks--always well covered--of Koons's much-discussed mania for perfection, as well as the sliding scale of "realism" that governs his art. The idea, he says, was to capture the "crystallization" of the printed surface. Not Lichtenstein's benday dots, but not a photograph either. Not quite a handmade readymade, but a custom-made one.

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FEW ARTISTS WORKING TODAY ARE MORE ADEPT AT BLURRING THE LINE BETWEEN innocence and prurience than Koons, as works from his '80s ceramic figures to Olive Oyl attest. For him, the painting's title character represents an archetypal cartoon heartthrob, so he paired her with an image of his "Venus," Gisele, which he had been saving for years. Koons superimposed the supermodel on the harbor background and then digitally removed her body, leaving only her miraculously taut but empty clothes. Although most of this image is blocked by subsequent additions, bits of her yellow and purple jersey appear just below Superman's profile and behind his right leg, adding abstract splashes of local color. It's up to the viewer to connect the dots.

"POPEYE," KOONS'S 2003 SHOW AT SONNABEND GALLERY IN NEW YORK, COULD JUST AS easily have been called "Pop Eye." For no artist working today has better digested the lessons of Pop than Koons, and never before had he so directly reckoned with his artistic forefathers. Talk about Oedipal drama. In Olive Oyl alone, Lichtenstein and Warhol are recast as superheroes, taking the form of Popeye and Superman, protagonists in the artists' classic Pop paintings. Superman, in fact, is appropriated directly from a 1961 Warhol masterpiece. At first Koons considered using the original comic-book source, and he carefully overlaid it with a tracing of the smoke billows in Warhol's painting to determine precisely what alterations Warhol had made (as seen above in the second image from the left). Ultimately he preferred the "simplification" of the painted Superman to the printed one. But no Oedipal scenario would be complete without a filial tweaking of the master, and Koons obliged by flipping Superman so that he enters stage right. This meant that the word PUFF had to be carefully re-reversed and tilted to fit within the lines of "super-breath" that Koons would paint in Warhol's beloved metallic silver. The fit is not quite right, though, and the lines subtly overlap or stop short of the letters. In such a minutely rendered universe, these gaps and crossings are somehow poignant in their imperfection--signaling Koons's intimacy with Warhol and also an inevitable distance from him.