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EVERYTHING CLEAR NOW? Unsigned
A large picture of a red, white, and black handclasp in the style of Chester Gould, the creator of "Dick Tracy," hangs on the second door of an East Side New York town house, at the head of an elegant, curved staircase. Just beyond, in the main showroom of the Castelli Gallery, there is a picture of a golf ball the size of a medicine ball, a painting of a coiled electrical extension cord, a cartoon kiss reminiscent of Milton Caniff ("Steve Canyon"), an 8-foot by 6-foot hand pushing the button of an Aerosol can.
All this is the art of Roy Lichtenstein, whose show opened there last week.
Owner Leo Castelli glided into the main gallery in soft black loafers and a gray f lannel suit and, with a conviction that only a dealer can muster, launched into his Lichtenstein lecture: "To say that Lichtenstein's paintings are like overblown comic strips is oversimplifying the problem. He paints from posters, or from instruction brochures, or advertisements, or the pictures on bleach bottles. He never paints from life. Even if he is painting a beer can, he paints only from a picture of the beer can."
As Castelli talked on, he placed Lichtenstein in the main stream of contemporary esthetic pioneering - somewhere between Robert Rauschenberg (whose assemblages of old shirts, mattresses, and bed sheets Castelli handles) and Jasper Johns (whose painted targets, flags, and calendars Castelli also handles).
"When Lichtenstein first brought these paintings into me, I didn't understand them," he admitted. "He didn't know quite what he was doing, either. The important thing is scale. He did a bathroom but it was not right. At last, I figured it out. The golf ball is huge. But the toilet bowl and the sink in that bathroom are only the size of any toilet bowl or sink. Part of it is scale, and part of it is the plastic quality, a mysterious quality that only experience can show you. Look at that picture! There is not an idea in it! But it is a painting. And Lichtenstein is a painter! "
It is a subtle yarn that Castelli knits, but it is not one of his own making. He has spotted a trend of which Lichtenstein is but one example. There is James Rosenquist, a former poster painter on Times Square, who paints legs, bottle tops, and typewriter keys in the heroic proportions of the Victoria Theater billboards. There is Wayne K. Thibaud [sic]., in California, who paints pies - gooey cbocolate-cream pies - in rows, just the way they are on bakery shelves. "Art," remarked Castelli, "is what you will it to be. One must rise above one's own taste, sometimes."
