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John Ashbery
PARIS, June 14. - Pop Art returns this week in two important exhibitions, one by American Roy Lichtenstein, who started the whole thing, the other by Martial Raysse, a Frenchman.
Lichtenstein's show is his best so far. It will disappoint some admirers, since he has discarded the comic strips which made for much of the impact in his previous shows and now uses images that are almost aggressive in their neutral banality.
One is a conventional rendering of a Greek portico, situated squarely in a two-dimensional space that is the next thing to nowhere. Another is a sunrise of the "If-You-Can-Draw-This-I'll-Make-You-an-Artist-in-6-Months" school. A "Landscape" and a "Seascape With Clouds," done in the artist's usual way with dots from a Ben Day screen, are close to abstraction. He also shows some new abstractions, made of plastic, which look like the work of a sophisticated computer.
MILITANT NEGATIVISM
Thus, Lichtenstein has thrown out anything that could possibly be construed as picturesque or "interesting" in an effort to let his militant negativism shine through unobscured. One can no longer misinterpret his work as a lighthearted spoof of mass media, or make the mistake of the Museum of Modern Art curator who found it Fascist and militaristic because of the comic-strip generals who peopled it.
But, by attempting to block all escapes for the imagination, Lichtenstein actually provides it with new stimuli. The temple and the sunrise are not even conventionalized illustrations, but something even more barren and cheerless. Yet the mystery of what they are subsists and, in the end, becomes the dominant force in the picture.
The Surrealist heritage of Pop Art is more than ever apparent. But it is a kind of reverse Surrealism, obtained by depriving ordinary reality of poetic and imaginative connotations instead of imposing them on it. Lichtenstein's Greek portico is the reverse of Chirico's colonnades. The latter were the concrete expression of metaphysical dreams and obsessions; they incarnated the invisible world. Lichtenstein achieves similar results by stripping physical phenomena of everything but the bare outlines of their physical appearance. (37 Quai des Grands-Augustins; to July 10.)
The New York Herald Tribune (European Edition), June 15, 1965: 5, © 1965, NYHT, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.
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