314
PETER SELZ
Dine and Wesselmann, actual objects are incorporated in the manner
of collage. There is no theoretical reason why such popular imagery, or
even the use of commercial art processes, should not produce works of
real interest and value. After fifty years of abstract art, nobody could
propose
~n
academic hierarchy of subject matter; after fifty years of
brilliant invention in collage and assemblage, nobody would be justified
in suggesting that any technique is taboo. The reason these works leave
us thoroughly dissatisfied lies not in their means but in their end: most
of them have nothing at all to say. Though they incorporate many forms
and techniques of the New York School (there is a particular debt to
de Kooning's women) and the Hard Edge painters, these forms have
been emptied of their content and nothing has been added except
superficial narrative interest. People who' ought to know better have
compared Pop Art to the work of Chardin, because it depicts actual
objects among familiar surroundings: an eighteenth-century still life,
a twentieth-century billboard-why not? Leo Steinberg in the Museum
of Modern Art's symposium on Pop Art goes so far as to suggest
parallels to the realism of Caravaggio and Courbet. But Chardin,
Caravaggio and Courbet created worlds of their own in which the
reality of the subject was transformed into an esthetic experience. The
interpretation or transformation of reality achieved by the Pop Artist,
insofar as it exists at all, is limp and unconvincing.
It
is this want of
imagination, this passive acceptance of things as they are that make
these pictures so unsatisfactory at second or third look. They are hardly
worth the kind of contemplation a real work of art demands.
If
comparisons are in order, one might more appropriately be made to
the sentimental realism of nineteenth-century painters like Meissonier,
Decamps, or Rosa Bonheur-all exceedingly popular and high-priced
in their day.
When I was a teacher in the 1950's, during and after the McCarthy
period, the prevailing attitude among students was one of apathy and
dull acceptance. We often wondered what sort of art would later
be
produced by these young men and women, who preferred saying, "Great,
man!" to "Why?" or possibly even, "No!" Now that the generation
of the Fifties has come of age, it is not really surprising to see that some
of its members have chosen to paint the world just as they are told
to see it, on its own terms. Far from protesting the banal and chauvinistic
manifestations of our popular culture, the Pop painters positively wallow
in them. "Great, man!"
In
the symposium on Pop Art at the Museum of Modern Art,
Henry Geldzahler, an enthusiastic supporter of the trend, clarified
both
