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Unsigned
"It's crazy ... it's wild ... it's just what we need..."
These were some spontaneous reactions to the "Pop Art and the American Tradition" exhibition at its opening at the Milwaukee Art Center Thursday night.
"I'm half way through the show and I haven't stopped smiling yet," said one woman. She was looking at a painting of pinball machines.
Below it was a real pinball machine being played by a young man with a long hairdo. The machine went "tilt."
Pop music from a jukebox rocked the gallery as a crowd of about 750 viewers gyrated among the 86 paintings, sculptures and old commercial signs.
INVITATION TO DANCE?
One couple tried to dance, but found little twisting room between a motorcycle and a painted wood sculpture of two dancing couples. A teen age girl saw an old wood carving of Uncle Sam with his hand in the air and thought he was inviting her to dance. Sam continued to grin, but he couldn't do the frug.
Several women were wearing pop dresses. One was white with a huge zipper running down the front; another was blue with a striped belt painted around it; a third was yellow with a big necklace printed on it.
A woman wore a pop necklace made of bottle caps and product labels, including grated cheese, coffee and crackle cereal.
Young viewers in black leather and decked like beatleniks were conspicuous by their presence. But a painting of "The Beatles" produced more smirks than screams. The four familiar figures are faceless.
As they sipped beer and munched monster cookies, viewers admitted doubts about the profundity of many pieces; but most agreed that the display was gay and frolicsome.
In the course of the evening, several women moistened their fingers and tested the heat of the iron in a sculpture of "Ironing Board, Shirt and Iron."
The exhibition consists of paintings and commercial signs dating to the 19th century as well as contemporary pop art, selected by the art center staff to illustrate a long interest among American artists in basing work on popular images.
OUTGROWTH OF ABSTRACTS
Ivan Karp, director of the Castelli galleries, New York city, was lecturer. He said he had seen at least 75 pop art shows, but "this one is the most beautiful and most remarkable exhibition of its kind."
Karp recounted the upsurge of abstract expressionist painting in New York city after World War 11 and its influence on art throughout the world. He said pop art developed from this.
"Pop art is a direct reversal" of that abstract painting, but it grew from it in "a series of transitional events," Karp asserted.
He showed color slides illustrating recent changes in pop art. He drew questioning laughs when he suggested that the stylized paintings of commercial images had abstract beauty of their own and were "so bad they are good."
He indicated that people were slow to see this beauty because the images tended to remain despised commercial work, "painfully present everywhere."
Milwaukee Journal, April 9, 1965: 6. Reprinted by permission of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
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