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Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. Scull, New York.
A portion of James Rosenquist's "F-111" (1965): "What looked 'cruddy and insouciant'...epitomized an intelligent concern."

which (when I visited it in 1947) each suite was decorated in skin of a particular animal--i.e., tiger, leopard, zebra. My imagination exaggerates but I like remembering it that way: each object in the room consistently animal."

Beginning with a 16-year-old memory, Oldenburg went on to change the perspective, change the proportions, change the textures, and add items of clothing which suggest a client who identified so strongly with the fantasy implicit in the room that she wanted, as nearly as possible, to make herself a part of it. 

Oldenburg himself saw the "Bedroom Ensemble" as a sculpture, an abstract composition in which rhomboids, columns and disks predominated. He also saw it as a place of rare and rational solemnity: "Pharaoh's or Plato's bedroom." In 1963, his use of photographed textures and of formica and vinyl was still a sensational novelty that set the "Bedroom" apart from what was regarded as high art. But it is already, in literal terms, "a period piece." (When Oldenburg was preparing the replica of the "Bedroom Ensemble" which was sent to London in 1969 for an exhibition of Pop Art organized by Suzi Gablik and myself, he found that the craftsmen who had made certain of its constituents had gone out of business, leaving no one to replace them.)

Lawrence Alloway in the Whitney catalogue said quite rightly of the "Bedroom Ensemble" that "the room connotes both the fetishism and the hygiene of the American life, as well as the desolate calm that characterizes museum reconstructions of period rooms."

Alloway touches here on one of the most controversial aspects of Pop Art: its apparent readiness to go along with, if not actually to applaud, elements in the American life which are traditionally repugnant to people of "cultivated taste." This is what Roy Lichtenstein was talking about what he was interviewed by the late Gene Swenson in 1963. Lichtenstein as a young man, from 1951 to 1957, had been a keen painter of Americana. In 1957, he had, like so many others, his Abstract Expressionist moment. But, being of a tenacious and discreetly combative turn of mind, he looked around for something that other people wouldn't go along with mindlessly, as they had begun go go along with Abstract Expressionism. He wanted to work against prejudice, not alongside it. "It was hard to get a painting that was despicable enough so that no one would hang it," he said to Swenson. "Everybody was hanging everything. It was almost acceptable to hang a dripping paint rag--everybody was accustomed to this. The one thing everyone hated was commercial art; apparently they didn't hate that enough, either." 

Two quite separate factors were involved in Lichtenstein's first Pop paintings. There was a wish to shift the ground of art; and there was also a certain sense of danger. Lichtenstein was consciously dealing with modes of expression which he thought of as potentially injurious. "Pop," he said in 1963, "is an involvement with what I think to be the most brazen and threatening characteristics of our culture -- things we hate, but which are also powerful in their impingement upon us." 

Lichtenstein was perfectly well aware that he was dealing with material that took a perverse delight in the deformations of human personality which occur (to take one example only) when men are licensed to kill one another. He knew that the cartoon strip offers a travesty of human relations in their richer, more reflective aspects. He knew that commercial art often relies on a debased shorthand to make people buy what they neither need nor want. He knew that the ephemeral nature of his subject matter compounded the supposed insult to high art. 

If his art had been as ephemeral as its subject matter--as tied, that is to say, to the tastes of a single season, or sometimes of a single day--then there would have been no reason to take it seriously. But Lichtenstein took, from the beginning, a long view. "Pop Art has very immediate and of-the-moment meanings which will vanish. Pop takes advantage of this 'meaning,' which is not supposed to last, to divert you from its formal content. I think the formal statement in my work will become clearer in time." 

It was, too. Lichtenstein has revealed himself over the last 15 years not as an iconoclast but as someone who believes (as he said himself) that "organized perception is what art is all about." Where the subject matter still imposes itself, it has, as often as not, an ironical intention: A magnified handshake turns out, for instance, to be a comment upon labor relations. Lichtenstein's object is not to cheapen art, but to look at it in a new way and see how it works. (There are early Warhols of a "how-to-do-it" sort which reveal the same curiosity as to the point at which consumer art shades over into an art that calls for contemplation.)

I have concentrated here upon major works by people who seem to me to be major artists. As with all kinds of art that catch on quickly and make certain people a lot of money, there has also been a disreputable spin-off: bad work done for bad reasons by bad artists. Perhaps Pop Art, by its nature, is particularly accessible to work of that kind. Much of what was best about Pop Art was specifically of the nineteen-sixties and cannot be revived. Valid art depends upon a combination of circumstances at a given time. When that time is over, it cannot be revived except as a conscious archaism. The initial and indispensable tension between art and society collapses--often after only a year or two--and what was once almost a matter of life or death becomes "amusing" or "nostalgic" or just plain cute. 

Pop also differed from earlier art movements in that big business could move in on it. Big business could do things with Warhol, for instance, that it could never do with Jackson Pollock or de Kooning. There was much to be marketed. Fortunes were made in no time. Minimal adjustment, or no adjustment at all, was needed to make the by-products of Pop acceptable to a mass audience. 

But the significant thing is that the best Pop works reveal more layers of meaning as they get older, just as the best Pop artists have proved themselves able to negotiate their way through a new decade with their potential still far from exhausted. Those are the tests of serious art, and, on a selective view, Pop passes them. [[symbol- solid black square, signifying end of article]]

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