When Pop First Popped : ‘Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition, 1955-62’ at MOCA documents the triumph of the genre and redefines its place in postwar art

Thirty years have passed since Pop art burst upon the scene, causing contradictory shrieks of delight or bellows of doomsday condemnation from invariably wide-eyed observers. All the while, the new art grabbed unprecedented media attention for American art--simply because Pop spoke in a visual language the media knew so well.

Part of a larger, fundamental upheaval in the way we think and talk about art--an upheaval that also included those radical propositions of Minimalism and performance art--Pop pulled the rug out from under all manner of cozy aesthetic assumptions. Things haven’t been the same since.

Only recently, however, have museums begun to examine Pop in the serious, groundbreaking way it deserves. Individual artists have of course been shown in considerable depth, and several have been widely celebrated. Still, a rigorous curatorial consideration of where Pop came from and what it has meant has been much more slow to emerge.

This is, I suppose, to be expected. A generation has passed since the noisy arrival and dissemination of Pop. Although it often doesn’t look it on the showy surface, in the institutional world of the art museum many things move with glacial languor. Now that a newer generation of curators and critics has come to the fore--a generation for whom Pop was simply Ground Zero at the moment of their entry into the world of art--a different, more full-bodied analysis has been in the making.

The most recent effort at such an inquiry opens today at the Museum of Contemporary Art, and it’s one that more than meets the challenging task. “Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition, 1955-62” means to unravel the complex knot of a period of remarkable metamorphosis.

By focusing on what could be called Pop’s earliest “painterly” phase, when painters were groping toward a different visual language than what had come before, the show traces this art’s crucial relationship to Abstract Expressionism--to both its premises and its prejudices.

What has been evident for some time, and what this show makes clearer than ever, is that our standard conception of postwar art is in need of significant revision. Abstract Expressionism--the “triumph of American painting,” to borrow Irving Sandler’s famous phrase for the emergence of the New York School from provincialism and obscurity to international center stage--isn’t exactly the watershed it has typically been made out to be.

Instead, the indisputable achievements of the New York School ironically represent the culmination of a European-style modernism, and its adaptation to an American milieu. In a very real and fundamental way, European civilization had come to an ugly and horrific end in the death camps of Auschwitz and Treblinka. Inspired by the example offered by numerous expatriate artists who had fled to the United States, and especially to New York, Abstract Expressionism stands most profoundly as a deeply committed artistic effort to rebuild that civilization anew, from the ground up, on American soil.

It simply couldn’t be done. The real triumph of American painting--or, to be more precise, of American visual culture--was manifested in Pop. Together with Minimalism and performance art, which were coincident with Pop’s gestation and share many traits with it, the watershed came in this more far-reaching transformation.

Although MOCA’s exhibition does not go quite that far in arguing for the implied historical revision--and I think it should--the complicated period of transition that is its subject is in steady and clear-minded curatorial hands. In 1986 MOCA chief curator Paul Schimmel performed a similar “in-between” analysis at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, with the eye-opening exhibition called “The Interpretive Link: Abstract Surrealism Into Abstract Expressionism, Works on Paper 1938-1948.” In a provocative and original undertaking, he followed the literal paper trail of drawings that led from European Surrealism to the artistic emergence of the New York School.

For the present endeavor Schimmel was joined by Donna De Salvo, curator of the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, N.Y., and Ahmanson visiting curatorial fellow at MOCA. In 1989, De Salvo organized the exceptional exhibition “Success Is a Job in New York: The Early Art and Business of Andy Warhol,” which examined in close detail the previously overlooked emergence in the 1950s of Warhol’s particular Pop aesthetic. (The show was also seen at Newport.)

“Hand-Painted Pop,” with 165 paintings, drawings and collages by 21 artists who were working in New York and California, offers a substantive look at the eight-year period in which gestural abstraction was, in effect, colonized and usurped. Significantly, the show is built around the museum’s permanent collection, which is especially rich in the early work of Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg and James Rosenquist. To these pivotal holdings has been added a wide array of superlative or interesting works, with special attention to the importance of Jasper Johns and, on the West Coast of this multi-centered movement, Edward Ruscha.

Today, when no single style of art is monolithic or asserts undisputed dominance over the life of culture, it can be difficult to imagine the powerful sway held by Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s. Any artist who wanted to make paintings had no choice but to confront it. Simple denial or dissent was not enough. The show makes it plain that to think of Pop as a wholesale repudiation of Abstract Expressionism, accomplished by a sharp break that saw artists simply turning their backs on what Pollock, De Kooning and the rest had wrought, is a mistake.

What many of these artists did, instead, was to approach Abstract Expressionism critically, absorbing it into seemingly contradictory patterns of artistic thought. Fluid, gestural strokes of paint are retained, for instance, in Johns’ flags, targets and maps, but they’re scaled down and “embalmed” in the translucent wax of encaustic paint.

In an exquisite room of seven Johns paintings that span the show’s dates, flickering color is submerged beneath a gray, nonetheless richly modulated surface. It’s as if the lively, bravura brush strokes of Ab Ex had been mummified, the dimly remembered artifacts of ancient history. With his U.S. flag or his great “Map” of the nation, the historical triumph of American painting was represented.

Johns made paintings that literally contained Abstract Expressionist cliches. “Gray Painting With Ball” is a canvas split in two, with an actual ball wedged between the halves, in honor of the typical macho slang for gutsy Ab Ex painting of the period. “That painting has real balls,” one could now likewise say of Johns’ very different art--and there they were to prove it.

Lichtenstein and Warhol continued this kind of literal upending, inserting into their paintings commercial images that cleverly spoke the same language as Abstract Expressionism, albeit in a wholly different--dare one say “all-American”?--dialect.

In a sequence of ink drawings done the same year as Johns’ “Gray Painting With Ball,” Lichtenstein skillfully mimics the style of Willem de Kooning’s famous drawings of women, although here the grinning faces are those of Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny. Later, a black-and-white painting of a fancy diamond brooch picks up on Johns’ slangy theme, taking it one more pictorial step: It’s a painting of the family jewels.

At MOCA, the room of Johns’ gray paintings has been pointedly matched by another exceptional room, this one of black-and-white paintings by Lichtenstein and Warhol, all dated from 1960 to 1962. The cumulative effect of these two chambers, which occupy the center of the show, is to subtly suggest the importance of all manner of black-and-white mass media to the newly consolidating genre of Pop: photographs, newspapers and other forms of print, television before the ubiquity of color sets.

Simultaneously, the emphasis on shades of gray also coaxes into view a hidden “enemy.” Color-field painting, then being touted by Pop’s most vigorous detractors as the rightful heir to Abstract Expressionism’s triumphant throne, was built on a conviction that the liberation of pure color was art’s appropriate direction. All those figurative gray targets and black-and-white images of Coca-Cola bottles said otherwise.

Frequently, they said it with wit, as in Warhol’s image of an old-fashioned, upright telephone, which frankly describes painting as an out-of-date means of communication for a mass-media world.

Lichtenstein went after Color-field painting perhaps more directly than any other artist. Consider his deceptively simple--and wickedly funny--picture of a woman’s hand using a bright yellow sponge to wipe a surface.

The image, adapted from a newspaper advertisement, shows Pop art metaphorically wiping clean the dirtied surface of abstract painting, the better to see things as they really are. In so doing, it pointedly depicts the then-celebrated method of using a sponge to apply fluid paint to raw canvas--a technique that had in fact been the genesis of Color-field abstraction. Lichtenstein’s “Sponge II” is a kind of veiled portrait of Helen Frankenthaler at work.

“Hand-Painted Pop” is also important in placing front and center an issue more commonly left to linger in the ostensibly extra-aesthetic shadows. Johns’ “Gray Painting With Ball” doesn’t quite match the macho, Ab-Ex slang of the day, because it’s one ball short. That three of Pop’s most consequential artists are gay is significant, both to the emergence of the genre and to much of the resistance it has traditionally encountered. For Pop represents the first major fissure in a traditionally masculine stone wall of modern art.

How could it happen? It’s widely accepted that a rudimentary form of Pop art first emerged in Britain; that nation’s social and psychological distance from the alien, American source of popular culture is one reason British artists were able to see the new visual culture with a clarity that, initially, escaped their colleagues on the other side of the Atlantic. Likewise, the utter exclusion of Johns, Rauschenberg and Warhol from any possible place within the good-old-(hetero)boy network of Abstract Expressionism undoubtedly provided them with a similar, necessary distance. They could see that genre with a clarity unavailable to a hopeful second generation of New York School imitators.

MOCA’s show is provocative on numerous accounts. It’s appropriately weighted toward major and minor figures in Pop’s evolution, with the singular exception of the collaged paintings of Jim Dine. Dine’s achievement is more akin to Rosenquist’s briefly considered one, which was simply to bring to fine art a never-before-seen billboard technique of painting, and far too many Dines are included for the slimness of their quality. Of the 21 artists surveyed only one seems wildly out of place: San Francisco’s Jess, whose two heavily impastoed figurative paintings speak more clearly of a mystically inclined Surrealism than of any attitude associated with Pop.

But these are quibbles. From the distance provided by the passage of 30 years, many things are becoming clear about Pop, which the glare of the ‘60s spotlight inevitably distorted and made obscure. Happily, “Hand-Painted Pop” offers considered illumination of this most important moment.

“Hand-Painted Pop,” Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., (213) 626-6222. Ends March 7. Closed Mondays, Christmas and New Year’s Day.