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ART: A NEW HANGAR FOR ROSENQUIST'S JET-POP "F-111"
Hilton Kramer
James Rosenquist's immense pop painting entitled "F-111," which dominated the American exhibition at the 1967 Sao Paulo Bienal and has been widely exhibited in European museums since it was first shown here at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1965, went on view yesterday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The painting is executed as a series of panels, and measures 86 feet long and 10 feet high when completely assembled. At the Metropolitan, it occupies three walls of a large gallery. Accompanying the Rosenquist work, which is on loan from the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. Scull, are three paintings from the Metropolitan's permanent collection: "The Rape of the Sabine Women" by Nicholas Poussin, "The Death of Socrates" by Jacques Louis David and "Washington Crossing the Delaware" by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze. The museum has mounted this motley assemblage under the rubric of "History Painting - Various Aspects."
"F-111" takes its title, of course, from the fighter-bomber of that name, and juxtaposes images of this military aircraft with a variety of commonplace motifs from the realm of consumer advertising and photojournalism. These motifs include, among other disparate images, an angel food cake, an oversize Firestone tire, a child's head under a hair-dryer and a mushroom cloud from a nuclear explosion under an umbrella. The picture is organized as a giant montage, with each section designed to be "read" separately and, at the same time, as part of the over-all image. Pictorially, the style might best be described as buckeye cubism.
A museum spokesman has described "F-111" as a "painted comment on the industrial-military aspect of the American scene." The director of the Metropolitan, Thomas P. F. Hoving, has declared that, in his opinion, the work "makes an important and timely statement," not only because of its form and expression "but sociologically as well." Mr. Scull, the present owner of the painting, has contributed an article to the March number of the museum's Bulletin in which he offers the view that the work is "a milestone in the visual literature of what is perhaps art's greatest theme: the struggle between life and death."
To descend from these dizzying altitudes of rhetoric, where the wish is father to every thought, to the humbler, more terrestial realm where Mr. Rosenquist's creation actually exists, is to find oneself confronting a slick, cheerful, overblown piece of work that is, expressively, on a level with the commercial art from which its visual materials are drawn. Far from prompting any deep emotions about the fate of civilization, this is the kind of visual spectacle - gay, extrovert, technically adept, but irredeemably superficial - that leaves the spectator feeling as if he ought to be sucking on a popsicle.
If there is an important sociological phenomenon here, it will be found in the way the Metropolitan has mounted the painting, not in the painting itself. The notion of employing Poussin and David as some sort of support for the Rosenquist work is itself an idea of stunning vulgarity and insensitivity, and thus not without significance in the realm of museum standards and responsibilities. Indeed, it betrays a total indifference to esthetic standards to include the Leutze painting in a class - no matter how defined - with Poussin and David, but I suppose it was necessary to come up with a work of high kitsch that would provide a transition from the high art of these French masters to the high camp of "F-111."
All in all, this showing of Mr. Rosenquist's painting is a lamentable event. True, the picture is famous, and Mr. Rosenquist enjoys an international renown because of it. But no one at the Metropolitan is willing to claim greatness for the work - even Henry Geldzahler, the curator of contemporary arts, avows that the "question of quality seems irrelevant" - and only greatness could justify still another mounting of the painting under these prestigious auspices.
Still, there are aspects of the occasion that one will long remember. Mr. Scull's contribution to the museum's Bulletin, for example is a classic of its kind. After recounting his personal adventures in and out of the artist's studio, Mr. Scull offers us his personal response to the picture in question. "For me, the F-111 is tremendous. I am not referring to its size, although it is certainly a tour de force in this respect, with some 850 square feet of real excitement.... It presents the essence of the United States' relationship to the world, displaying the equation of the good life of peace, with its luxuries and aspirations, and our involvement with the potential for instant war and final annihilation.... It speaks to all mankind, employing the plain language of everyday men, not the secret signs of the specialist."
I wonder if it was art historical contributions of this quality that Mr. Hoving had in mind when he announced some months ago his ambition to make the Metropolitan "the Harvard of museums"?
The New York Times, February 17, 1968: 25
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