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THE NEW YORK TIMES . APRIL 6, 1974

Art: American Pop at the Whitney

77 Works Fill Two Floors of Museum

By HILTON KRAMER

About every new development in the arts, both critics and the public tend to take sides. But few developments in the art of the last quarter century have generated quite so much division and debate as the pop art movement provoked when it first burst upon the scene in the early nineteen-sixties. For some faithful observers of modern art, pop represented the end of seriousness and the rise of a new vulgarity. For others, of course, it marked a sudden ascent to esthetic paradise. Whatever else pop art may have lacked, it quickly demonstrated its power to command attention.
With remarkable speed, the pop movement passed from being a scandal to something like classical status in the museums and in the histories of modern art. In 1965-66, no fewer than five books published on the subject. Magazines and newspapers of every intellectual persuasion lavished attention on the movement and its personalities. Even collectors of pop art became overnight celebrities, and gossip columnists joined with critics and curators in promoting the movement.
Was this instant success a fluke, or did it reflect something basic about the art itself? Was it all just a shrewd promotion, or was it what its partisans claimed it to be—the latest in a succession of major avant-garde events?
    For Lawrence Alloway, the British-born art critic who has been resident in New York since the early sixties and who was one of the early partisans of the movement, pop art was — and still remains — a phenomenon "in which success has been combined with misunderstanding." In both the exhibition called "American Pop Art" that he has now organized for the Whitney Museum of American Art and, even ambitiously, in the book-length catalogue he has written to accompany the exhibition, Mr. Alloway has set out to correct this "misunderstanding." It will be interesting to see what effect, if any, this effort to enlighten us may have on future discussions of the subject.
  The exhibition at the Whitney which opened today occupies two entire floors  of the museum—space enough, one would suppose for a definitive survey of the movement. Yet one's impression is of something fragmentary and blurred. Art we to take the 77 items in the show as representing Mr. Alloways's selection of the enduring masterpieces of pop art?

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Robert Rauschenberg's "Persimmon" is at the Whitney
Seventeen artists are represented, some by a single work, some by as many as seven or eight. Are we to take this list as representing the core of the movement or as something less categorical? For and exhibition that aspires to correct a "misunderstanding," this show raises almost as many questions as it attempts to answer.
Where, for example, are the single most famous works of the pop movement— Andy Warhol's paintings of Campbell soup cans and coke bottles? Where is Claes Oldenburg's giant "Hamburger" or Jasper John's painted bronze version of two cans of Ballantine Ale? If pop art can be said to have produced its classics, these are surely among them. Are we to take their omission as signifying some portentous revaluation? Does it matter?
There are certainly enough works on view to inform any newcomers to the subject about what— more or less—it once consisted, but their selection has a certain random quality. The names we expect are here—not only Warhol, Oldenburg and Johns, but also Jim Dine, Robert Indiana, Roy Lichtenstein, Mel Ramos, Robert Rouschenberg, James Rosenquist and Tom Wesselman. 
The pictures and constructions based on comic strips, common objects, consumer advertising and the visual culture of the mass media are all here. And the step-by-step development of pop art from the neo-Dada synthesis of abstract-expressionist painting and object-art, especially in the work of Messrs. Johns, Rauschenberg, and Dine, is conscientiously set before us. 
But there are also many artists represented in the exhibition who have at best only a marginal connection with the principal theme. And there is o discernible principle of taste at work in the selection.

Where Mr. Alloway's main effort has been invested is not, I think, in the selection of the exhibition but in the writing of the ambitious catalogue that accompanies it. It is certainly his most sustained work of historical criticism to date, but the catalogue is not a work that wastes much time on such matters as the quality of an individual artist's achievement. it sets out, rather, to align the accomplishments of pop art with communications theory and in effect, to justify pop as some sort of grand synthesis of high culture and mass culture.
Mr. Alloway attempts, in other words, to transcend the divisions that pop art created more than a decade ago, but in doing so he is obliged to abandon the language of art criticism in favor of a kind of pseudo-social science. He seems not to notice that the very language he employs reduces pop art to the level of social evidence—which is nonetheless a surprise from this particular quarter.
In any case, a definitive survey of pop art as art remains to be done, and when it is properly done, it will, I suspect, be a good deal smaller than the present show.