An All-American Mannerist

By ROBERT HUGHES

In St. Louis, the post-Pop stylizations of Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein was always the most cerebral of the Pop artists. Yet his images in the 1960s, taken from comic strips and ads--"I know how you must feel, Brad!" whispers the enormous girl's mouth to its exclusively art-world audience--were once rebuked for their dumbness, their lack of "real" art content. To mimic the processes of commercial art, to take a common image and replicate it on canvas, much larger, with hard-edged line and stenciled arrays of Ben Day dots in primary colors for shading: Could this be art? Is the Pope Catholic?

A good deal of the popularity of Pop art, as the late Harold Rosenberg pointed out some years ago, partook of "the astonishment of Moliere's character on learning that he has been speaking prose" all his life. Suddenly, there was the commercial vernacular of America, that amniotic fluid in which every collector had been nurtured, right there on the museum wall. And the curious paradox was that, in Lichtenstein's case, the fluid --those cartoon images of teen-agers and Korean War jets--was transparent. After a while the imagery hardly got in the way at all, and Lichtenstein could be treated as a formalist much more readily than, say, Claes Oldenburg, with his gross impurities and gargantuan appetite for metaphor. A lot of Pop art owed something to surrealism. Lichtenstein's never did.

In the early 1970s, Lichtenstein was fond of quoting Matisse, that supreme artificer of images denoting calm and luxurious revery. Run through Lichtenstein's mill, however, the images lost this aura entirely, becoming stark, neutral or even disagreeable. The three fish in Still Life with Goldfish, 1972, a broad transcription from one of Matisse's still lifes of 60 years before, wear dyspeptic expressions and seem not at all pleased with the painting of a giant Lichtenstein golf ball on the wall behind them.

Enough time in the museum can wash almost any art clean, but Lichtenstein's work, always restrained, has by now reached what amounts to a trance of near mechanical decorum. It scarcely trespasses upon the world of feeling or lived experience. If the word academic means anything in relation to art today, it must apply to Lichtenstein's output: an oeuvre committed to the play of a given set of pictorial mannerisms, faultlessly sustained, often funny and always dryly intelligent, all of them directed toward reducing art to a sequence of predictable signs. Anything can be turned into a Lichtenstein by the application of those hard outlines, Ben Day dots and primary colors--not only comic strips, but Greek temples, mirrors, entablatures, still lifes and other people's paintings.

A large exhibition of the work from this all-American mannerist's post-Pop years is now on view at the St. Louis Art Museum, titled "Roy Lichtenstein, 1970-1980." The show will be traveling the museum circuit for years, from Seattle to Tokyo via New York, Fort Worth, Cologne, Florence, Paris and Madrid. Organized by Art Historian Jack Cowart, it contains 110 works that together give a good view of the march of Lichtenstein's stylizations.

The exhibit also provides a deftly culture-bound experience. Lichtenstein is nothing if not erudite, and to see him parodying established modern masterpieces (Matisse's Red Studio, or the cubist work of Picasso and Juan Gris, or Carlo Carra's Red Horseman) is to see a very informed mind at work, particularly at obscure levels of parody. How, for instance, does one render the odd ambiguities and shifts of cubist or futurist painting in terms of this rigidly determinate dot-and-line style? Of course, it is not paintings but reproductions that Lichtenstein parodies; reproduction itself reduces art to dots, and by increasing the scale of that convention, Lichtenstein exposes it, reminding us that most of our experience of art is vicarious and based on print.

Whether this point is worth making over and over again, at such length and great expense to collectors, seems moot--though not to Cowart, who detects in Lichtenstein's ability to apply his method an almost Picasso-like energy. "Tomorrow he could take Renaissance, Classical or other known subjects or, on the other hand, quickly invent a new vocabulary of images," Cowart writes in the catalogue. Perhaps, but would it matter? What one misses in a large proportion of the work on view in St. Louis is, simply, the sense of necessity--an engagement deeper than style.

Sometimes, rather surprisingly, it is there. In particular it seems to lurk in the Mirrors, a series of paintings Lichenstein completed between 1970 and 1972. With their silvery surfaces, reflection lines and bevels and breaks in the light, which manage to function equally as pattern and as illusion (the mirror, in art, being one of the arenas in which both can live side by side), these paintings possess a ravishing formal elegance.

They are also more plainly invented than the works derived from print sources. We do not think of mirror reflections as having a style, and in that sense Lichtenstein's mirror paintings sidle closer to unmediated experience, and so indirectly to nature, than his other work. They also gather poignancy from the fact that they are empty. One gazes at them frontally, as at a real mirror, but nothing shows up in their superficial depths. The spectator is a phantom. These icy, imperturbable tondos and ovals may say more about the nature of Lichtenstein's imagination than anything he has painted since. What could convey better than a blank mirror his belief that exhibitions of the self are hateful in painting?

In recent years, Lichtenstein has been preoccupied not merely with parody, but with parodies of parody--paintings based on the cartoonist's view of modern art. There was once a "pop" view of surrealism, loosely derived from Dali and Arp and epitomized in the 1940s in such verses as:

On the pale yellow sands There's a pair of clasped hands And an eyeball entangled with string, And a plate of raw meat, And a bicycle seat, And a Thing that is hardly a thing.

This is the caricature of surrealist kitsch that Lichtenstein invokes in paintings like Reclining Nude, 1977: one figure sporting Swiss-cheese holes `a la Henry Moore, another in a stiff suit like a Magritte businessman, a Kandinsky-style squiggle here, an Arpish wiggle there, and so on.

In parodying the most recognizable traits of textbook modernism as reflected by its satirists, Lichtenstein may certainly be said to display a post-modernist sensibility; but what else is going on? Not, it appears, very much, and to call these paintings "visionary," as Cowart does, is to overrate them. Rather, they are grounded on a somewhat smug familiarity with the power of cliche. That, of course, is one dilemma of art education.

In effect, Lichtenstein's show invites us to have the cake and eat it too--to see his work as part of a "heroic" historical continuum while deriding the cliches to which that continuum has been worn down. But this cannot divert the suspicion that, for all his manifest abilities as wit and designer, his art has become repetitious. --By Robert Hughes

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