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School of Pop: Thomas Crow on the class of '57
ArtForum, Oct, 2004 by Thomas Crow
BY THE TIME POP ART EARNED ITS CAPITAL P, the British artists, architects, and intellectuals known as the independent Group had produced a decade's worth of future-focused art and polemic. It was critic and IG spokesman Lawrence Alloway who first used the term to capture the group's enthusiasm for all things mass produced and American. In the following pages his 1962 essay "Pop Since 1949" appears alongside Clement Greenberg's "Pop Art." The high-formalist critic's reckoning with the movement that turned the tide against "pure painting" is published here for the first time. Together, these essays set the terms for the debate that this special issue of Artforum traces into the present Contributing editor Thomas Crow opens this section devoted to pop before Pop with an essay that follows our thread from the eighteenth-century atelier of Jean-Antoine Watteau to the studios of London's Royal College of Art in the mid-1950s.
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When a cadre of ambitious French artists incorporated themselves into the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in 1648, they sought to elevate their new company by setting strict rules of decorum. Prominent in its inaugural code was the stipulation that no academician be permitted to keep a shop or even to allow the display of his work in such a way that it could be seen from the street. At a stroke, the academy severed art in its high-minded sense from its formerly easygoing relations with the everyday requirements of commerce. Beforehand, if a painter or carver wanted to turn out an eye-catching signboard for an artisan friend, no habit or stigma stood in his way. But the "royal" aspirations of the new group forbade this kind of sullying participation in the mere conduct of trade. After ward, such gestures could recur only under the cover of irony or as a pointedly temporary break with accepted practice.
That rule remains as much in force today as it was then (perhaps more so, in that it took some time for the new academic artists to break completely with old habits). A few revealing episodes over the intervening three and a half centuries--signposts, in effect--can serve to bring the topic up to date.
When Jean-Antoine Watteau painted an intricately pictorial signboard for his art-dealer friend Edme-Francois Gersaint in 1721, the product was so obviously extraordinary that it hung over Gersaint's premises in the Pont Notre-Dame for no more than a week or two and eventually landed in the collection of Frederick the Great. The painting stages a rich and waspish send-up of the commerce in art. Recalling seventeenth-century models where a princely collector would be shown standing proudly among the prizes of his collection, here these vain consumers of culture examine and covet entirely generic simulacra of actual paintings, every one of them a product of Watteau's own invention.
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The parody, nonetheless, works so subtly that there was nothing, apart from the radiant desirability of the canvas, to prevent its being used for its ostensible purpose and doing that job brilliantly well. The same could be said of Theodore Gericault's 1814 painting of a muscular blacksmith restraining a restive horse. A reworking of the monumental Wounded Cavalryman he had shown that same year as an allegory of Napoleonic defeat, this reduction of the heroic model to common working-class terms was meant to grace the exterior of an actual forge, the artist applying his pigments to unprepared boards with all their joins and nailheads visible beneath the image.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Gericault notoriously defied the norms of the Royal Academy to which he could never conform sufficiently to qualify for membership. His gesture with the blacksmith's sign--consistent with his hiring a London hall in 1820 to put The Raft of the Medusa on display for spectacle-seeking customers--followed from a generally rebellious stance that made him the prototype of Romantic outsiders for decades to follow. But Romantic rebellion spawned no further efforts to conflate fine art and paying commerce at this level of ambition. In the wake of Impressionism, Georges Seurat was another self-conscious outsider harboring equally monumental ambitions. And like Gericault, he was drawn to the sign-world of the streets, making himself a student of the incipient science of advertising. The mannered and exaggerated contours in Jules Cheret's circus posters appeared to him to contain a visual technology of enticement, which he sought to channel through paintings like Le Chahut, 1889-90, and Le Cirque, 1890-91, into a more elevated diagnostics of modernity.
He did not himself go so far as--or lower himself sufficiently--to try his hand at motivating the paying customers himself. But one of his chief inheritors, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, used much of the same linear vocabulary to create a graphic style in advertising that still carries impact today. The collapse of art into its subject matter displayed itself as concretely as possible in 1895, when the Moulin Rouge entertainer La Goulue went out on her own at the Foire du Trone on the eastern outskirts of the city, setting up her act in a structure that appeared from the outside to be literally supported by two large painted panels by Lautrec.
