Claes Oldenburg with his ice cream cone © Claes Oldenburg
Four decades ago someone asked Clement Greenberg, America’s most influential art critic and the high priest of abstract expressionism, what he thought about Pop art. It seems Marilyn Monroe silk screens did not impress him. “It will probably last the way the pictures of Gérôme or Bouguereau… have lasted,” Greenberg predicted—naming two French academic painters now overshadowed by the Impressionists. “It is nice small art and it is respectable, but it is not good enough to keep high art going.”
As so often, though, Greenberg turned out to be on the wrong side of art history. Pop hasn’t just endured; it has triumphed, and on both sides of the Atlantic its visibility is greater than ever. On 14th April the Museum of Modern Art in New York opens a years-in-the-making retrospective of Claes Oldenburg, the Swedish-born American sculptor best known for massive reproductions of everyday items—an ice cream cone, a lipstick. (It’s something of a homecoming: Oldenburg’s brother Richard was director of MoMA for 22 years.) And after stops in Chicago and Washington, a remarkable and eye-opening exhibition devoted to Roy Lichtenstein is now on view at Tate Modern in London, which includes not just the artist’s comic book-style paintings, but sculpture, drawings, and collage.
More than Minimalism or abstract painting, Pop has become the defining style of the 1960s—and 50 years on, not only have the prices for Pop art reached stratospheric heights, but its critical and cultural credibility has never been more solid. It is decidedly establishment now, and visitors to MoMA or the Tate today look at this work with very different eyes. The shift that these artists effected—assimilating mass culture into high art—is taken for granted now, and their impostures now inspire more veneration than shock.
Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, and their colleagues were responding not just to the explosion of commerce and commercial images in the years after the second world war, but the homogenisation and banality that went along with it. Shocked critics misunderstood Pop as a dumb celebration of mass culture; the art historian Michael Fried lamented Oldenburg’s “naive aesthetic” in 1962, while the New York Times, in 1964, called Lichtenstein “one of the worst artists in America.” But lowbrow subject matter was not an end in itself, nor was its use especially innovative. The Dadaists had integrated the ephemera of popular culture into their work long before, and in London Eduardo Paolozzi was reworking pulp novel covers as early as the late 1940s.
Something bigger is going on in Lichtenstein than mere translation. His paintings play a double game—they expose the emptiness of manufactured popular imagery, but they also chip away at the distinction of art, and the social structures that produce that distinction. And Oldenburg’s early plastic sculptures, which he sold himself at illogical prices in a packed-to-the-rafters New York storefront, were hardly just goofy knick-knacks; they called into question the most fundamental rules of both art and economic exchange. It was the same with Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes, Wayne Thiebaud’s gumball machines, and Ed Ruscha’s gas stations: Pop may have been cool in appearance, but it was radical in consequence.
In one way, the stakes of Pop are clearer to us than they were to contemporary audiences. Compared to 1963, in 2013 it’s much easier to see past mere subject matter, the Coca-Cola bottles and Mickey Mouse cartoons, and dig into the political and social resonances that Pop has always had within it. (The exhibition “Sinister Pop,” which closes at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art on 31st March, did an excellent job showcasing the darker dimensions of the movement, how it reflected everything from the war in Vietnam to racial discrimination.) Not only that: the values of Pop has been so triumphant that today we have no expectation, when we go to an art gallery, of some pure aesthetic experience beyond the “real world” of economic flows, mass media, or even geopolitics. Art now is simply a constituent component of one giant image stream, and Pop offers a rare opportunity to interrogate the rules that govern it and to think about how it can be disrupted or remade.
At the same time, Lichtenstein and Oldenburg should also remind us of the much lower stakes of our contemporary artistic moment, when the category of “art” is so capacious, and the reach of the market so wide, that there’s no longer any real possibility of making as large a splash as they did. Pop looked straightforward, even mundane, to its first viewers, but it ended up shaking the very foundations of culture. The kind of exclusionary judgement that Pop upended is now a thing of the past, though, and not even the most critical or disruptive practices can produce the slightest wobble in the supremacy of the art market—a market in which Lichtenstein, Oldenburg and especially Warhol are now blue-chip commodities. Pop really was an artistic revolution. But the most important and most sobering lesson to be learned at MoMA and the Tate this spring is that it might have been the last one.
