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Collection of the artist. Claes Oldenburg's "Bedroom Ensemble" (1963): "The fetishism and hygiene of American life." 


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true bent. But he never followed through his original intimations with the single-minded, transcontinental ferocity which gave the others so big a name in the nineteen-sixties. For that ferocity, that single-mindedness, and American inheritance was needed. The source material of American Pop was not chosen, as a collector chooses between one piece of French porcelain and another. It imposed itself. American Pop is about things that never entered into English Pop: things like desperation, and survival, and winning or losing in situations where the winner takes all.
  Take, for instance, the painting that greeted us on the top floor of the Whitney. It was what is called, in Old Master painting, a diptych- a set of two independent but related panels-and it was painted in 1962 by Robert Indiana. One panel had on it the word EAT. The thr had on it the word DIE. That's all there was to the picture, which was in all 6 feet high and 10 feet wide. What did it look like in 1962? A flashy antithesis "writ large"? A joke hardly worth making? A slap in the face, quite certainly,
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for the Abstract Expressionists, who had given American art a new international stature. Abstract Expressionism was a confessional art in which every mark of the canvas gave away something of the painter's inmost nature. A picture like "EAT/DIE" was the very opposite: impersonal, brutish, blank.
  Or was it? Indiana was born in 1928. he grew up, therefore, during the Depression.  The word EAT, and the juxtaposition of EAT with DIE, were not things that he chose to paint, 30 years later. They represented an alternative that he had lived through, and lived out, in his own person. At least one of his EAT paintings is now owned by a collector who has certainly never known what it is to go hungry. But Indiana spelled out the meaning of the image when he wrote of how in his boyhood "EAT signs signaled the roadside diners that were usually converted railway cars of a now-disappeared electric interurban complex that had been taken off their wheels and mounted on cement blocks when the motorbus ruined and put that system out of busi-
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ness in the thirties. In similar cheap cafes my mother supported herself and son by offering 'home-cooked' meals for 25 cents...."
  So there was more to American Pop than the wish to give another kind of art a break. There was the wish to give dignity and monumentality to experience which in itself had
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been both petty and torturous. But Pop was also, and self-evidently, making a pitch for an alternative art. Indiana put that, too, in the simplest possible form when he was interviewed in 1963. "Pop is everything art hasn't been for the last two decades. It is basically a U-turn back to a representational visual commu-
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nication. . . . It is an abrupt return to Father after an abstract 15-year exploration of the Womb. Pop is a re-enlistment in the world. it is shuck the Bomb. it is the American Dream, optimistic, generous, and naïve. . . ."
  Those last three words would apply, certainly, to
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