Page 33 - Studio International - January 1968

occupations he poses as an abstract artist like Mondrian
or Vantongerloo (a disguise from which he later emerges).
The clinical picture planning, in which he parallels these
artists, repudiates physical virtuosity in aggressive con-
flict with his immediate New York stock.
Warhol also specifically rejects the abstract expression-
ist's love of paint. Oldenburg, Dine and Rosenquist all
used the language of Pollock and de Kooning, albeit for
very different purposes. Both Lichtenstein and Warhol
betray awareness of their predecessors only by a meticu-
lous contradiction of their attitudes and techniques.
Warhol, in the Campbell's Soup series, set aside subtle
pictorial arrangements and exquisite paint quality as
though they were an extrovert self-indulgence. In their
preference for banal themes they even go some
way to eliminate subject matter. The familiarity of
hot dog or Coke bottle makes choice an irrelevance; they
are more concerned with the style of its intermediary
treatment than the object itself. Curiously enough, if
Warhol's aim is frankly seditious, to pervert and destroy
older aesthetic viewpoints, another aura is given off by
Lichtenstein. This is partly the consequence of his techni-
cal detachment but not less it is due to the emotional
remoteness of his pictures. Under the flippant surface
Warhol seethes like Goya; Lichtenstein is more like
Ingres. Though the comic strip heroines drip tears in
great blobs he doesn't move us to pity. There are many
sad and sadistic images (a boot smears flesh on a hand
that grasped a gun) which merely cause us to smile—they
are like the old horror comic joke of a man hanging by
his fingers from the top of a cliff while his tormentor
stands over him with a knife saying, 'If you want to die
with your hands on, drop'. His aerial battles and ex-
plosions are no more a condemnation of war than a
glorification of it. They excite a purely aesthetic response.
He's really cool.
An objective of making art without actually seeming to
try pervades Lichtenstein's work at every level. After
proving that composition is unnecessary he went on to
make rather careful organizations of his pictures using an
almost photographic technique of close-up. Composition
starts with the definition of boundaries, the relationship
of the formal elements to the edges of the canvas. After
the very first of the comic strip paintings whole frames are
no longer treated as autonomous objects. What Lichten-
stein gives is part of a frame, as though he drew boun-
daries around a detail before blowing it up. At this point
choice is exercised in a very critical way, as for a photo-
grapher the options are manifold. Using a readymade
drawn environment filled with ersatz human incident he
can zoom into these dramas isolating an expression, a
mood, an event, even a thought. It's like pressing the
button but since this pseudo world is static he can really
get those edges where he wants them and his refined skill
in the artistic placement of the image within the frame
carries a great deal of what we recognize as quality in a
Lichtenstein.
A feature common to all Pop Art is a readiness to move
freely between different conventions and different imag-
Pistol 1964 ery. A Rosenquist gives an experience analogous to that
banner in tempera and felt
of looking through a magazine. The jolt from page to
82 x 49 in.
Leo Castelli Gallery, New York page doesn't come as a shock because we know the form.