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LOVE
US
8c

The postage-stamp version of Robert Indiana's "Love," issued last year: "Apotheosis of the optimistic, generous, naive."

Continued from Page 27

what is probably the most familiar of all Pop images: Indiana's "Love." Whether as the image on an 8-cent post-age stamp, or on the cover of Erich Segal's best-selling "Love Story," Indiana's apoth-eosis of the optimistic, the generous and the naive must have got into pretty well every American household at one time or another. But the heraldic simplicity of Indiana's imagery is only a part of Pop; and although American Pop was in part a reaction to Ab-stract Expressionism, the rela-tionship between the two can-not be set out in terms of "either/or."

"Either/or" sounds good at the time it is first employed and then goes on to wear more and more badly. With time, we see more and more what binds one contemporary to another, and less and less what separates them. What happens to ourselves, in our own day, seems to us unique and unprecedented. But as we grow older, what strikes us about that same experience is not its uniqueness. It is, rather, the way in which it related both to what went be-fore it and to what came afterwards.

One of the great polemical statements of modern times in art is, for instance, Rob-ert Rauschenberg's "Bed" (1959). Fifteen years ago, it seemed the last word in in-solence. For a decade and more, American artists had labored to give American art a new name, and here was a man who just hung his own bed on the wall! What was he trying to say? That high art was a hoax? That anyone could do it? What kind of an

attitude was that? For per-haps the last time in history, people really got angry about a work of art, as Napoleon III had got angry when he wanted to take his whip to a Coubert, and as the Pari-sian cab drivers got angry when they saw an Impression-ist painting in the window of a dealer's gallery and shook their first at it. Something sacred was being spat upon, or so it seemed, and some-thing stable was being torn to pieces.

"Bed" looks quite different today. What strikes us is not the affront to Abstract Ex-pressionism, but the affection-ate resemblance to it. Rausch-enbert was neither a blun-dering boor nor an inexperi-enced youth; he was an ex-ceptionally intelligent man in his middle 30's who wanted to see to what extent the freedom and spontaneity of Abstract Expressionism could be carried over into art of quite another kind. "Bed" re-mains a bed, quite clearly; but in its upper half it merges with what is, in effect, an Abstract-Expressionist paint-ing, complete with the paint structures which people should have learned to recog-nize, by 1959, as the mark of an individual temperament in action.

As for the lower half of the picture, we have learned since 1959 to acknowledge the spe-cific contribution of the Am-erican quilt to American sen-sibility. What in 1959 looked like mere chance now looks like an inspired counterweight to the rhapsodic upper half of the picture. The quilt, in this context, stands for geo-metry, and stabiltiy, and a pre-ordained order. What Rausch-emberg put into this painting is an encapsulated history.