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The Long Burst of Pop
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11677 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1994 |
2,641 Words |
| Author
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Eric Gibson
Eric Gibson, art critic for the Washington Times, last wrote
on Henry Ossewa Tanner in the September 1991 issue of The
World & I. |
Last fall the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York turned itself over to a retrospective exhibition of the paintings and sculptures of Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein. This was hardly the first such expansive museum celebration accorded the artist. Five years ago the Museum of Modern Art organized a retrospective of Lichtenstein's drawings. Next year the National Gallery of Art will host a similar survey of his graphic work.
Lichtenstein first caught public attention with his 1961 painting Look Mickey, a comic-book image of Donald Duck exclaiming (to Mickey Mouse) his success in fishing while, unbeknownst to him, the line is hooked into his pants. With his prolific output of teary-eyed comic-book heroines and the like, Lichtenstein came to be tyepcast as "the comic-strip artist," one whose work, along with that of Andy Warhol, most typified Pop Art to the masses. Since about 1965, he has mostly eschewed comic-book subjects, but he has maintained his distinct comic-book look for three decades. In the 1970s he embarked upon a series of pastiches of works by such artists as Mondrian, Picasso, Leger, and Matisse. Most recently, he has been engaged in colossal mural commissions packed with art icons and references to his own and other people's paintings. These have more in common with the enormous "machines" of the nineteenth-century French Salon painting than advanced art of any kind.
After forty years, one might wish that an artist had more to say. Cold, disengaged irony permeates all Lichtenstein's work. His immaculately rendered paintings often show a striking sense of design. But he does not seek to engage the emotions of his viewers, and he purposefully avoids subjects that could be called serious or profound. Instead, he limits himself to witty, skillful, ultimately superficial comments about art, the art world, and the banality of everyday life.
Lichtenstein is not the only Pop artist to be given such museum attention. Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg all have either already received the same treatment by our major museums or are about to. An Andy Warhol Museum is scheduled to open this spring in the artist's hometown of Pittsburgh (which he fled for New York once out of art school). What this amounts to is an ongoing celebration of the Pop Art movement, in which the movement's principal artists have been quietly transformed from iconoclasts and subversives to modern masters.
Are they really that good, that important? A walk through any one of these exhibitions suggests not. The Guggenheim's Lichtenstein show
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