Page 43 - Studio International - January 1968

sculpture, bring an additional level of reference to the swank facades stuck on to delis and bars all over the United
dominant one of style. States. It is as a public style (ball rooms in luxury liners,
Today the forms of the 30s have a particular meaning, Hollywood homes, sets for musicals) and as threshold
both in terms of familiarity and of irony. The 30s have architecture (bar fronts, store entrances, hotel and movie
been, as Lichtenstein called them in conversation, 'a theatre foyers) that the 30s form sense received its most
discredited area, like the comics'; on the other hand, they luxurious embodiment. The machine aesthetic was anti-
have become visible, even conspicuous again. He ob- handcraft and anti-nature, values which are, broadly,
serves wrily of the period: 'I think they felt they were associated with Pop Art. Hence, the industrial content of
much more modern than we feel we are now'. Sustaining Pop Art has a precursor, all ironies aside, in the 30s.
ideas of the 30s were the machine aesthetic and techno- The first reaction to Lichtenstein's new work included, I
cracy, which assumed a happy future for man as the think, a tendency to favour the sculpture. The sources of
machine's gift. A kind of Platonism of the production line both painting and sculpture are, broadly, ornamental
raised machine-made forms to the status of Pure Form. and the sculpture simulates this most completely. How-
Although there were puritanical and exuberant versions ever, congruence of source and adaptation is not the only
of the machine aesthetic (Alfred Barr, for instance, criterion, though the echoes of modernistic boudoir
stuffily deplored the merely `modernistic'), both extremes mirrors and ocean liner bannisters in the sculptures is a
shared basic assumptions. Thus the forms of the 30s are great pleasure. In the paintings, however, Lichtenstein
symbols of an antique period with a naive ideal of a has made a problematic jump from the original orna-
modernity discontinuous with our own. The forms that mental form to a painted image. The original objects are,
used to symbolize the machine and its benefits have as it were, sucked into a flat, compressed area, where
changed their meaning to symbolize the taste of the they symbolize the form-sense of the 30s as well as the
period that produced them. The symbolic content has artist's pleasure in the transformation of craft into art
shifted from the original referent to the channel itself, and the blurring of the two. He is quoting from the crafts
where it is located by Lichtenstein's serious ironies. which, of course, have been, in recent aesthetics anyway,
There are links between the 60s and the 30s as well as an usually qualified as inferior to art: mere craft, mere orna-
irrevocable difference, and Lichtenstein's new period ment. As radically as in his earlier collaboration with
depends on the double focus. For one thing, he lives in anonymous comic strip artists, Lichtenstein is affiliating
New York, among its monuments and its detritus, from his art with a discredited area, known beforehand to his
n
the dazzling Chrysler Building to a thousand run-down spectators, but not in the new context of his art.

1 Bruce Glaser, ed., 'Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, Warhol: A
Discussion'. Artforum. IV. 6. 1966. (Originally broadcast, June,
1964.)
2 Ibid.
3 John Coplans, 'An Interview with Roy Lichtenstein'. Art-
forum. II. 4. 1963.
4 Pasadena Art Museum, 1967, Roy Lichtenstein. 'Interview' by
John Coplans.
5 Gene Swenson, 'What is Pop Art?' (interview). Art News.
62. 7. 1963. (Warhol's misleading and overquoted chat about
machines and how nice to be like them is from this early source,
also.)
6 Glaser. Op. cit.
7 Pasadena. Op. cit.
S Swenson. Op. cit.
9 Pasadena. Op. cit.
10 Ibid.
Note: comment on Lichtenstein's work is adapted from the
author's 'Roy Lichtenstein's Period Style'. Arts. 42. 1. 1967.

Seascape 15 1966 Rowlux on paper with lamp
22 x 26 in. Leo Castelli Gallery, New York