ART : Too Much Picasso, Too Little ‘Alley Oop’

Right now, the Museum of Modern Art has Zap Comics on display. Also “Alley Oop,” “Heart Throbs,” “Men of War,” Mad magazine and Cadillac’s 1956 ad for “the greatest advancements it has ever achieved in motor car styling and engineering!”

This may sound like fun-house, turn-the-tables thrills to you. It is also amazing coming from the Bauhaus headquarters of the high-taste police. The exhibition is called “High & Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture.” So naturally it stars Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol and Jenny Holzer.

It is all about the love-hate relationship between high art and the mass culture of a mechanized age. But this is no modern romance; it is a class war. And winner takes all. What we have here is just one more version of that time-honored art world formula: Need new blood? Get the lower classes!

Call it the Caravaggio equation, after the 17th-Century painter who rescued the art of Rome from an overdose of manners by recruiting nasty adolescent street toughs to pose for his pictures.

When artists need to breathe life and blood into art-gone-stale, they invite in the real world. So why not an art institution?

Particularly now, when the Museum of Modern Art has just completed its changing of the guard. The old regime, led by William Rubin, emeritus director of the department of painting and sculpture, defined modern art as an increasingly abstract and cerebral continuum from Cezanne through Picasso to Stella.

This made for some dazzling exhibitions, from “The Late Cezanne” to the museumwide “Picasso” retrospective. But that left the museum hopelessly blind to the art of the last 25 years, which is seldom abstract and which shudders at the whole idea of progress.

Then, two years ago, enter the new painting and sculpture director, Kirk Varnedoe. When it comes to defining modern art, he comes squarely down on the side of both modernist tradition and idiosyncratic inclusiveness in his recent book “A Fine Disregard.”

“The rules of the game are not something you play by,” he wrote. “They’re something you play with.”

Unfortunately, play is not the operating principle of the High-Low show, which is, in effect, Varnedoe’s solo debut at MOMA--though he picked a collaborator to help, New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik.

Varnedoe’s other MOMA exhibition, “Vienna 1900,” was a reconstituted version of a Viennese predecessor, and he collaborated with Rubin on the “Primitivism” exhibition, which wanted to show how modern art borrowed from tribal cultures.

“Primitivism” was gorgeous and controversial. “Vienna” was stunning, and staged with the theatricality of an operetta.

Either controversy or theatricality surely would have helped High-Low. Instead we get Cubism, lots of Cubism. It’s as if Varnedoe is telling Rubin--whose last exhibition was “Picasso-Braque: Pioneering Cubism”--what the old boy left out. And what the old boy left out, in the new world of revisionist art history, is social context and iconography. Those words that Picasso and Braque introduced into their paintings meant something: They came from ads and newspapers, and the artists were really punning it up. When they cut “urnal” from “Le Journal,” according to this exhibition, they were

making a schoolboy reference to urinals.

So the show starts out with a reproduction of the sort of newspaper-loaded kiosk that Picasso and Braque might have encountered, which is cute; there are also a lot of blown-up newspapers and ads circled in red where the artists appropriated something. So far so good.

But there is far too much Picasso and far too little “Alley Oop” at the MOMA. The comic books and car ads haven’t been invited in to reinvigorate the place. Except in that very first Cubism part, they are merely there to serve their betters.

They are there the way you get little thumbnail black-and-white plates in art history books that relate a full-colored painting to its sources. You mean Roy Lichtenstein borrowed from comic books? Gosh! And there’s Lichtenstein after Lichtenstein to compare with some of the hardly doctored comics from which he borrowed. You have to turn to the catalogue to learn that both Lichtenstein and the Cubists were revitalizing popular forms (“Young Romance” and “Army at War” were about to be blown away by feminism and the Vietnam War). But no speculation as to why.

When we get to the graffiti part of the show, there isn’t a single example of real subway graffiti on view. Not to mention the street-graffiti-kids-turned-art-world-heroes whom MOMA disdains to recognize. Not even Keith Haring. Instead there are a great many of Jean Dubuffet’s brutally scrawled post-Holocaust paintings, and Cy Twombly’s calligraphic version of Abstract Expressionism in graffiti dress. And who wouldn’t welcome a chance to see so much good Dubuffet and Twombly in one place? It’s just that this context turns them into cliches.

What would really be new would be to see a De Kooning “Marilyn Monroe” here, or a “Woman” with the mouth he cut from a Camels ad. But you’re not going to see Abstract Expressionism in a show like this. Not even Ad Reinhardt’s scurrilous cartoons lampooning the art world. That would go against received opinion, and received opinion is what this show is all about.