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[[image-painting]]
Robert Raushenberg,New York Bird Calls for Oyvind Fahlstrom. 1965, Combine painting, 84" x 60".

[[image-painting]]
John Haberle, A Bachelor's Drawer. 1890-94, o/c, 20" x 36". (The Metropolitan Museum of Art.)

[[paint]]ings around to see what may be on the other side, but to those who know this artist, the dots convey a signal: this is it. The stretcher-frame paintings may also be regarded as a parody of geometric abstraction. Indeed, from his early pictures in comic-book style through his paintings á la Picasso, Mondrian, Cézanne, Monet, and the Art Déco manner of the 1930s, Lichtenstein has been the most conscientious parodist in American art.

Haberle was also a powerful parodist of art, although by no means on so grand a scale as Lichtenstein and for different ends. Haberle liked to use paintings as still-life subjects or parts of still-life subjects. His Torn in Transit series, for example, exploits the notion that a painting has been shipped in a paper parcel which has been damaged. The wrapping paper, the string, and the shipping labels are done with the utmost meticulous Realism, but the paintings inside the torn wrappings must be totally different in style or the whole idea is lost; in two instances, therefore, the paintings inside the wrappings are in the cheapest imaginable buckeye style; in one instance it is in a shimmering, dappled, impressionistic manner. It would be a grotesque exaggeration to imply that Haberle's pictures of wrapped pictures gave the cue to Christo, Stephen Posen, and others who delight in the mystery of wrapped objects, but these Haberles do have a certain prophetic quality in that regard.

The buckeye element in Haberle is important considering his relationship to Pop art. In the Metropolitan Museum is a work his called A Bachelor's Drawer which is of special importance in drawing a parallel between his work and Pop. The fascination with commonplace illustration, suggested by the magazine illustration of the gent with the fancy whiskers, the "cigarette pictures," and the book entitled How to Name the Baby all draw close to Lichtenstein. The Confederate bills and the stamps and cards are straight Warhol, while the raucous nudity of the naked girl in the photograph is pure Ramos. All this in a painting completed in in 1894.

The thrust of the entire work, with its cigar-box lid, its broken comb, its pipe, matches, theater-ticket stubs, baggage checks, and so on is a zesty, hell-on-wheels assault on the highfalutinness of art. Mark Twain would have understood it perfectly. From the point of view of vernacular subject matter, no better work of Pop has ever been produced in this country. Notice, however, that the artist's need for flatness in his illusionism forces him into as unillusionistic a device as may be: all the objects in the bachelor's drawer are pasted onto its front in a totally impossible fashion. And this brings the question of flatness and illusionism full circle. Haberle was given to such extremes; and they brought his era of Pop imagery to its end.

In the pictures of wrapped picture the point of the illusionism is that three-fourths of the canvas is not illusionistic. In the picture called Night at the New Britain Museum of American Art, not only does a considerable part of the illusion depend upon nonillusionistic devices but upon a deliberately incomplete effect as well. Night is a large, completely finished picture of an unfinished picture. When you go that far, you have reached the end of the line; there is nowhere else to go, and the American Pop tradition had to lie fallow for half a century before it sprang up fresh again.