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Robert Indiana. Andy Warhol. Roy Lichtenstein. James Rosenquist.

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prevails. After two decades, the combine-paintings have taken rank among the classics of American art; but with everyday that passes, they get farther away from Pop and reveal themselves, instead, as entirely idiosyncratic. 
  As to hard-core Pop Art, two related views have long been current. One is that anyone can do it and that it should not be classed as art at all. The other is that there is something basically rapacious about it. The hard sell and the fast buck are fundamental to Pop, in this reading. And it is admittedly true that certain Pop artist were very well promoted and got rich at a time when Barnett Newman had barely stopped going to the pawnshop to get money to eat. It is also true that the Bstract Expressionists had created by 1960 a public and a body of collectors and institutions which, as Robert Indiana said "are willing to take risks lest they make another Artistic-Over-sight-of-the-Century." People were ready for Pop, and Pop looked easy, and so they bought it.
  But, once again, history
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sorts things out. James Rosenquist is an archetypal Pop artist in so far as he worked for eight years as a commercial painter, out-of-doors on storage bins, grain elevators and gasoline tanks, and later on billboards in New York City. There is a difference between borrowing techniques and living by them, and Rosenquist exemplifies it. If people sometimes think of his work as a mindless and uncritical adaptation of motifs that are best seen from across the street, they are mistaken. His most famous painting, the "F-111" of 1965, is one of the key statements if the mid-sixties. It did not seem right to Rosenquist that the life-style of thousands of Americans should be based on their participation in the making of an aircraft which was a "horrible killer."
  "A man has a contract from the company making the bomber," he said in 1965, "and he plans his third auto-mobile and his fifth child because he is a technician and has work for the next couple of years." Some little girls were going to be burned
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alive-that was what had to be faced in the mid-sixties, and Rosenquist was one of the Americans who didn't run away from it.
  This is just one of the ways in which Pop Art has turned
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out to contribute to human dignity. What looked "cruddy and insouciant" (to quote one very good American critic) has often turned out to epitomize an intelligent concern. Another major work in the
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canon of Pop Art is, for example, Claes Oldenburg's "Bedroom Ensemble" of 1963. This is based, Oldenburg once said, "on a famous motel along the shore road to Malibu, Las Tunas Isles, in
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