84
BARBARA ROSE
ways. Pop artists felt free to use representation, which abstract art
had rejected, because they took their subjects from reproductions–
printed images that immediately identify themselves as flat, and as
having only one property, that of
surface.
During the sixties, pseudo–
representational styles based on reproductive techniques, as well as
images derived from reproductions, were used by pop artists. For
example, Roy Lichtenstein created a cartoon style simulating the
printed image; and Andy Warhol de\'cloped a method for transfer–
ring silk-screened images to cam'as that combined representation with
reproduction.
Although most pop art is little more than banal commentary on
the pervasiveness of popular imagery, Lichtenstein's and Warhol's
painting is particularly sophisticated because it simultaneously ac–
knowledges that reproduction has usurped the mimetic function of
painting, while representing images in the terms familiarly associated
with reproduction. The most thorough as well as the most profound
examination of the relationship of representation to reproduction,
however, is the extensive rumination on the subject that constitute.:;
the complex iconography of Jasper Johns's paintings, drawings, sculp–
ture, and prints. Continuing to explore, in a linked series of methodi–
cal transformations of context, technique and association, the relation–
ship of depiction to representation, of the literal to the illusory, Johns
refuses to take the position that any art - even abstract art - has
completely disembarrassed itself of the vestiges of pictorial represen–
tation binding modern art to its past.
Johns is certainly correct that the situation is not so simple as
it seems. For the most part, the
paintin~
of the New York School
that called itself "abstract" was still conceptually wed to traditional
means of depicting the figure is space. Johns made a punning refer–
ence to this fact in his 1955
Figure 1
J
a painting of the numeral one
in white imbedded in a "field" of white that served as an analogy for
landscape. Unlike the human figure, however, the numeral one has
only a
sin~le
surface, so that no matter how traditional Johns's im–
pressionist technique, the "figure" one remained flat, contiguous with
the surface on which it was depicted.
As usual, Johns anticipated things to come. The central prob–
Inn
of the sixties was the establishment of a post-Cubist st
ylc
of ab–
straction no longer indebted to Renaissance modes of depiction and
