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THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR   The Home ForumĀ®   Thursday, August 8, 1974

INTRODUCTION TO
20th CENTURY
[[printed vertically]] ART

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Courtesy of the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York
"Monogram" 1959: Construction by Robert Rauschenberg
Who's to say it's not art....What is art?

Pop Art

Our series on 11 differing approaches to aspects of modern art has avoided mere chronology. Certain aspects of the subject, however, are largely confined to particular periods. Thus "pop art," while being an aspect of 20th-century art, belongs uniquely to the 1950's and 1960's. Eighth of eleven articles. 

Pop art was the 20-th century artist's coming out party. He was crashing into the dance of the real world; fixing his own energies to the frenzy of the pop culture scene. "New American Realism," one critic called it. But the fate of the art of this century was to jostle the placid hopes of those looking for a new realism. 

The young artists of the late 1950's and early '60's had stepped out from the closed and inner world of abstraction only to crash into a flickering media world. It was the fastest shifting landscape in the history of the world: urban America, commercial America. But worst and most frightening was no past and future -- only an eternal dizzying present. 

It was that Present that pop art personified, and inflated. The nowness and gaudy plastic letters and Day-glo colors emanated from Coca-Cola Country, U.S.A. but spread everywhere. The commonplace object, the banal and recurring images of advertising, struck the eyes of this keen new generation. Soon, artists registered its images in the classic Campbell soup can by Andy Warhol, in the American flag by Jasper Johns, in the comic strip blowups of Roy Lichtenstein. And instant later, the mass media gleefully replayed what had been a replay of the mass media. The new/old images began to possess life as independently as their commercial sources. 

Pop art was born.

It is easy to trace the genesis of pop art. Real objects had already been affixed to art works (stamps in a Picasso collage). Stuart Davis thumbed his nose at normalcy in his 1924 box of soap -- the ordinary object had been depicted with deadpan adoration. Thus a dozen daddies fathered pop, though, perhaps more than any other movement, pop art is uniquely mid-century American. 

Dada and surrealism had bamboozled, tweaked, attacked. Junk and collage had elitist art-consciousness messages. Pop, however, was not inner-directed or anxiety laden. It was not an act of effrontery. It claimed to be anti-intellectual. It had technological links. "I want to be a machine," was Warhol's classic utterance of the era. The works of Warhol and his peers were acts of journalism, if you will. Straightfaced reportage. Yes, the scale, the hard-edge color, the spontaneity, and offbeat juxtapositions hit the beholder's eye. John's bronze cans, Warhol's blowup of Marilyn Monroe, Robert Indiana's letters LOVE and Tom Wesselman's Great American Nudes startled the onlooker. . . yet who was to say that their novelty was, in fact, new? What was new was the locale: in the gallery. One shifted vision. And the movies! Endless hours of Indiana's snoring man on film, and Warhol's freakish entourage . . . . But look, these were no actors! No artifices were imposed before the viewer. You and I, anybody, could be an actor in the  biggest pageant of them all which is life, only It's Live on Film. 

The shrug of Cool was the artist's stance. "Who am I to say no?" said Robert Rauschenberg, a bridge between abstract and expressionism, when asked if he thought he should have won the 1964 Venice Biennale. "Why not?" was canonized by pop. 

It is not surprising, then, that pop art affronted the populace for no more than 15 minutes. It was a brief shocker, indeed. True, it seemed to mock the car -- the idol of the modern age -- in a Rosenquist fender mural or a Chamberlain smashed auto sculpture. True, the dirt-encrusted "Black Seat Dodge" or beanery tableaux of Edward Keinholz might be seen as satire. But instead it seemed as if the populace and the media endorsed pop's "cuteness" all too soon. Perhaps that is why critics never had time to accept and defend and dwell upon pop as they would other art movements of the decade. Pop was never quite intellectually okay. 

So, if pop's newnesses were the fastest to be assimilated (however incompletely) by a lay audience, its "oldnesses" were the first to be dismissed as passe. A season, it seemed, and "op" tripped over the heels of "pop." It was the briefest movement under the neon sun. In less than a decade, the heroes of the New American Realism became historical figures, analyzed in ways outside their movement. 

Still in their forties, the pop radicals seemed the grandpas of contemporary art. Next act, please, said the voracious public. 

Jane Holtz Kay

Jane Holts Kay, former art critic for the Monitor, has written for "Art in America" and "Art News" and is the architecture critic for the "Nation." She has also been a writer and an editorial commentator on art and architecture for WGBH-public TV.

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Photo by Ann Munchow
Courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
"Batmobile": By Mel Ramos
Recurring comic strip made art

[[image]] 
"Soft Pay Telephone" 1963:
By Claes Oldenburg
The commonplace made into art

The Monitor's daily religious article

Beyond the world's end

Many individuals at one time or another for one reason or another feel as if the end of their own personal world has come. 

But help is at hand. The compassionate presence of the Christ is there. Christ Jesus gave us the promise, "Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world" (Matthew 28:20). The Christ can guide us away from desperation, from becoming embittered or cynical. It can let in new hope and a willingness to start again. It can encourage us to begin rebuilding. 

What did Jesus mean by his promise to be with his followers to the world's end? Certainly we can always expect to have his high example and the glowing words he used to instruct and expound. But even more, we shall always have with us the Christ, the holy power and presence behind Jesus' words and deeds. Jesus expressed this power and presence so completely that he is known as Christ Jesus, but the Christ is more than can be measured by a single human lifespan. The Christ is eternal. Not only is it with men to the world's end; it has been forever. 

Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, in her book, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," says to this eternal presence (p. 332), "Christ is the true idea voicing good, the divine message from God to men speaking to the human consciousness." She writes further (p. 333), "Throughout all generations both before and after the Christiaan era, the Christ, as the spiritual idea, -- the reflection of God, -- has come with some measure of power and grace to all prepared to receive Christ, Truth." Christ makes available to all at all times the comforting, healing, and restoring message of divine Truth. But it's not enough to know what the Christ is always with us. We must know what the Christ is. 

How can we prepare ourselves to receive this Christ, Truth, so that we can feel its presence in our own hour of need or when others turn to us for support and encouragement? We can companion in prayer with all that the Christ means to us as the true idea of God, of what God is and does. We can study to lean more of God as divine Life and Love, as the governing divine Principle, the wholly good Spirit, infinitely intelligent Mind. And we can lean more of man, not as a material mortal but the mercy of chance and disaster but as a spiritual idea, expressing the intelligence, goodness, and love of God. 

Shortly before his crucifixion Jesus prayed (John 17:5), "And now, O Father, glorify thou me . . . with the glory which I had with thee before the world was." The Christ reveals to us man's glorious relationship to God established before the world was; and in our darkest hours the Christ assures us that nothing can separate us from that eternal and divine glory. 

Daily Bible verse

My righteousness I hold fast, and will  not let it go: my heart shall not reproach me so long as I live.--Job 27:6

A summerful of tidbits

Some people may feel this oddity dims my prestige, but I must say I am not the world's greatest saladier. I can get along fine without greens, and accordingly have just had my first and only-ever meal at one of these authentic steak houses where they make you go to a salad bar to select assorted goodies and make your own salad. When I go out to eat, I prefer to sit in comfort and leisure and be waited on. I might, if somebody insisted, carve the roast meekly to help out the management, or whip the potatoes, but making my own salad . . . I came back with a smidgen of lettuce and said, "Do you mind the summer Kathy was a botanist?"

That was a gruesome season, saladwise. The thing began along in April of her second year in school, and didn't have anything to do with salads. Her very good teacher set the little tykes to bringing in wild flowers, and there was a score kept on the blackboard with one point accruing for each posie delivered and identified. Kathy had, I think, an unfair advantage. From the middle of March through April our farm attention was on the maple orchard, and when school didn't keep, or the minute it let out, our children raced to the woods to help Daddy with the sweetenin'. The warning of approach was a hoot owl toot, and when I heard it I have the appropriate answer and got ready a nappy of syrup for the official inspection. It was their duty to sample and keep a keen eye on the quality. A consequence of this arduous labor was considerable time close to vernal nature, and the children had more than usual knowledge of trees, birds, animals, flowers, insects, and fungi. Until school closed in June she scavanged everything from skunk cabbage to moccasin flowers. 

So this year-end blossom hunt in school became a summer vacation interest, and the lass would come bringing me this and that with, "What's this one?" We got to the fall asters before school opened. And somewhere along the line we came to the matter of food and taste, namely -- edibility, non-edibility, and palatability. Being no great fanatic over salads, I kept my instruction in the negative, usually saying, "Oh, a body could eat it if he wanted to, I suppose." Thus began Kathy's research into the salad potential of each weed. Every evening she would make a salad in the big wooden bowl from the results of her day's field collection. She had a stool that brought her to sink level, and she'd stand there an hour chopping and slicing. Ten times, each experiment, I would hear Mother call, "You nick yourself the least bit with that knife, and I'll call the whole thing off!"

Dispatch from the farm

Kathy demonstrated that almost anything can be worked into a salad. Radish leaves, while strong, can be mollified by a wad of kale and purslane, vinegar and mustard, and actually rendered tame by a topping of chopped horseradish tops. Chopping horseradish tops makes a kitchen sound like four-alarm fire, and Kathy would come bringing her daily salad all red-eyed and weepy. She had a way of giving horseradish a nutty complexion by peeling and cutting the tender shoots of next year's blackberry canes as garnish. 

We have a common garden weed we call mustard. It has nothing to do, I think, with commercial condiments, but Kathy showed us it has a mustard flavor, and I found that preferable after so many evenings of horseradish. However, in honesty I must admit a great many of her offerings turned out to be adequate salads if anybody likes salads, and we ate, that summer, many a mixture of common weeds with some relish, although perhaps we were beguiled by Kathy's botany and our own curiosity. We went along appraising milkweed, worts, plantains, mullen, brakes, pokes, pumpkin foliage, and a summerful of tidbits that came back to me in a flood as I served myself at that steak-house salad bar. 

When I got back to our table with just enough greenery in my bowl to suit my moderate needs, Kathy's mother heard my question and made answer thus: "I sure do -- wasn't that awful!"

It was at the time, whether anybody likes salads or not, but memory has a way of softening such things. When Kathy ran our salad bar, we never had to wait on ourselves in this respect, and her September enrollment in the third grade ended my horseradish days. 

John Gould 

Within the closeness of God's family

To feel a natural warmth and affection for all our brothers and sisters as children of God is to be drawn within the encircling love of our divine Parent. 

The Bible speaks of this bond of universal brotherhood and assures us that we are all the sons and daughters of God. It tells us that God can help us in ever circumstance.

A fuller understanding of God is needed to reach to the core of every discord with a healing solution. A book that speaks of the all-goodness of God, His love and His constancy, in clear understandable terms is Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy. 

Science and Health shows the reader how to love in a manner that brings about happy relationships, an honest affection for all mankind, and a deeper love for God. 

A paperback copy can be yours by sending $2.25 with this coupon to:

Miss Frances C. Carlson.
Publisher's Agent
One Norway Street. Boston. Mass. 
U.S.A. 02115

Please sent me a paperback copy of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures:       (F)

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