Painterly pop - traveling exhibition of pop art mounted by the Los Angeles, California Museum of Contemporary Art

Art in America, July, 1993 by Michael Duncan

Since its inception roughly 30 years ago, pop art has never made things easy for the art historian. Perplexity has greeted the movement ever since Max Kozloff attempted to fathom the "new vulgarians" in Art International in 1962. Pop's impudence and its infatuation with camp, kitsch and the infantile have so far thwarted efforts to elevate the movement to the sanctified status of Abstract Expressionism or Minimalism. Yet given the brash untidiness of much contemporary art, Pop's freewheeling embrace of advertising and mass-media images still seems completely relevant, just as the "holiness" of those other movements seems tired. An exhibition now touring the country, "Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition, 1955-62," organized by Donna De Salvo and Paul Schimmel at L.A. MOCA, offers a new slant on Pop's place in art history. Here, in strange, ass-backwards fashion, Pop is "elevated" by demonstrating lingering traces of the very movement it reacted against: Abstract Expressionism.

Curators De Salvo and Schimmel have made their reputations with shows specializing in transitional moments in art history. De Salvo's "Success is a Job in New York . . ." (1989), at New York University's Grey Art Gallery, surveyed Warhol's roots in commercial art, while Schimmel's "The Interpretive Link" (1986), at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, dealt with the relationship between late Surrealism and Ab Ex. In their statement introducing "Hand-Painted Pop," the co-curators announce that this show's aim is to "complicate the false clarity with which we have traditionally understood Pop art." In their view, Pop works have been mistakenly perceived as hard-edged and mechanically produced, with no sign of the artist's hand to be found.

To belie that notion, "Hand-Painted Pop" presents early Pop works which all show the mark of the expressive paintbrush. The exhibition thus sets out to reflect the "messiness" of the transitional period it covers, a feat that is accomplished by retracing the rather well-worn path from Rivers to Rauschenberg and Johns, then on to Oldenburg, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Rosenquist and Ruscha. Along the way, some prime examples from MOCA's own Panza Collection are spotlighted. A fascinating group of lesser-known figures--including Peter Saul, Allan Kaprow, Mel Ramos, Jean Follett, John Wesley and Jess--are represented with a few works each, providing welcome impediments to facile views of art-historical "progression."

"Hand-Painted Pop" starts off with five of Larry Rivers's early, lyrical paintings, which are characteristically filled with references to friends, family and romantic Americana. Perhaps unavoidably, "Hand-Painted Pop" takes much of its commemorative tone from Rivers's work. Childhood for most baby boomers took place during the years that the show covers, 1955 to '62, and the exhibition's historical information rooms, which include timelines as well as period advertisements and TV commercials, create an air of nostalgia for that era which the Pop paintings reinforce. Those works, in turn, up the sentimental ante, since they are drenched in remembered images from the artists' childhoods in the 1930s and '40s. Oldenburg once wrote of his own art, "I made it all up when I was six years old." As if to prove the point, the Pop works in this exhibition look back to Disney cartoons, Dick Tracy, Mom's refrigerator, Little Orphan Annie, school supplies, cupcakes, Popeye, grade-school maps, air-gun targets, Superman and milk bottles. With two generations of memorabilia to contend with, it seems that today these works have grown harder than ever to pin down.

The real bite of this exhibition comes from the issues raised in the catalogue--beautifully designed by MOCA editor Russell Ferguson--whose eight essays examine Pop's transition years from a variety of viewpoints. In "Unsentimental Education: The Professionalization of the American Artist," David Deitcher considers the Pop artists as products of postwar American art-school programs. He discusses, in particular, the influence of Ohio State professor Hoyt Sherman's perceptual-training program on the young Roy Lichtenstein. Flashing images for a tenth of a second, Sherman instructed his students to draw what they saw. In so doing, the students would get in touch with an instantaneous "esthetic" vision that perceived objects as "wholes" suitable for pure two-dimensional depiction. Lichtenstein's bold reduction of forms is given a new source in this quasi-scientific perceptual experiment. Deitcher also points out that in 1948 Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning began to use slide projectors to help them blow up their sketches to full-size paintings; thus Pop's supposed break with the handmade purity of Ab Ex is complicated from the other direction, too.

The most controversial essay in the catalogue is Kenneth E. Silver's reading of the work of Johns, Rauschenberg, Twombly and Warhol as veiled gay autobiography. Johns's close relationship with Rauschenberg spanned six years (roughly from 1955 to '62, the years of the exhibition). Although qualifying his assertions at every step, Silver attempts to pull their relationship out of the closet clue by clue, painting by painting. Johns's dry, comic placement of two balls between the panels of Painting with Two Balls (1960) is seen as a taunt to the macho, "ballsy" excesses of the Ab Ex world: a visual pleasantry, Silver suggests, which contains "a great deal of rage." In considering Rauschenberg's Bed (1955) along with Johns's Target with Plaster Casts (1955), whose compartmentalized body parts significantly include a plaster penis, Silver says: "The two works offer us some approximation--an inchoate and implusive bodying forth, in the Abstract Expressionist sense--of the excitement, intensity, and danger of two men falling in love." Segueing to the end of the relationship, Silver interprets the coupled fork and spoon hanging by a wire in Johns's In Memory of My Feelings--Frank O'Hara (1961) as emblems commemorating the two artists' lost domesticity.