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art news nov 1963 Rauchenberg file Reviews and previews Robert Rauschenberg [Castelli; to Nov. 21] has a show of nine or ten large vertical canvases subdivided into unevenly rectangular shapes which combine elements of collage and frottage - photographs, illustrations, advertisements, close-up photographs of New York street sign - with painted and drawn elements. Viewed as a whole, the series of works relate one to the other as a kind of homage to New York, offered in cinematic, cut-up fashion,; like, to quote the apt words of Ivan Karp, "the beginning of the movietone news." Rauschenberg has a formal, plastic quality which usually manages to come through even his most outrageous efforts. He is essentially a painter. He has a real feeling for arrangement, for color, and these virtues are at his beck and call in the expression of a mood of gentle, romantic reverie. Although now seen as a forerunner of Pop Art, he is not to be classed with this group. In fact, he has a secure place all of his own in New York Painting. L.C. Kurt Schwitters' [Chalette; to Nov. 30] poem, My House, printed in the useful catalogue accompanying this show, begins, "I am to build a house of ice," and ends, "The greatness of my heart melts, All melts .../ But other people built other houses of ice." In an essay excerpted in the catalogue, Schwitters warns against style. As ideas, these remain live issues; but the context in which we see them in Schwitters' work is anachronistic, much as it is in Horace when we read that "we and our works are doomed to die." To marvel et the esthetic of these collages - and some of them are indeed very beautiful and "right" - is to ignore their death as live issues, the end of their tension between the way they first looked and the people who were able to see them at that time. Harold Rosenberg's condemnation of those who seek a "delayed verdict" on contemporary art could be demonstrated in no better way than in this exhibition - the mouth goes dry and the mind freezes at the mention of formal values (at least they should), the stomach is not punched with the challenge of the new, and the heart is not yet touched with nostalgia. Imaginatively, perhaps, we can reconstruct a situation where these collages looked the way people felt - a few at least - and imagine the value of them as something for those people then to hold to and work with. In a way, intentionally or not, he denied the artistic equivalent of Christian after-life and in so doing recalled the Greek union of body and soul - not so much that art is tied to its time in the sense of Zeitgeist as that death is possible, as art as of the soul with the body. The selection of work itself - geared to esthetics and art history - is superior. G.R.S. Roy Lichtenstein [Castelli] is stirring up dust with his enlargements of details of comic strips [p. 24] and commercial art and one of the questions being asked is whether it is art or not. Since the people asking this question cannot agree, within the context of modern art, what they mean by "art", it might be better to examine it from the point of view of expressiveness or communication. It is not realized by the new public which has gone overboard for Pop Art that Lichtenstein is an experienced painter who had several one-man shows in other galleries prior to this present phase. Those earlier paintings were close to Klee in manner and had a humorous quality. The humor was in the form, and never obvious. It appears to this reviewer that this quality of humor survives in this present work, mainly in the selection. It should also be evident to anyone who takes the trouble to examine his work that Lichtenstein does not copy: he enlarges, selects, alters the colors, changes the proportions, yet retains the general character of the originals. But whether he copies mechanically or not is also more or less irrelevant, for the question introduces a concept which fundamentally has nothing to do with what he is doing. His comic strips are, in fact, found-objects. In selecting and enlarging them, he is taking them from their original context, and forcing us to see them in a different environment. Thus he makes us aware of our surroundings in a new way, something which all art should do, and which certainly abstract and Abstract-Expressionist art is still doing. Erle Loran's remark [A.N., Sept. '63] that he liked Lichtenstein's version of his diagram enough to use in the next edition of his book, Cezanne's Composition, reminds one of Picasso's wish that somebody would see a bicycle in his bull which he drew from a bicycle. [[Picture]] Rauschenberg: Windward, 96 inches high [[Picture]] Schwitters: The Action Takes Place in Thebes, collage, 1918, 6 1/2 inches high 12
