ART REVIEW : The ‘60s Were Only the Beginning of Roy Lichtenstein’s Sober Career : Pop Was Just a Prologue

Roy Lichtenstein was among a number of artists who playfully put the Pop in Pop art between 1961 and 1965. In the process, they swept away the pale doldrums into which third- and fourth-generation recapitulations of Abstract Expressionist painting had by then so dismally fallen.

What’s interesting about the Lichtenstein retrospective that opened Sunday at the Museum of Contemporary Art is that this wildly inventive moment turns out to have been the prologue for a wry but nonetheless surprisingly sober career for the now 70-year-old artist. Don’t be amazed if you leave the show firm in the conviction that Lichtenstein started out wildly Pop but soon settled into becoming a latter-day Neoclassical painter.

The exhibition at MOCA is considerably smaller than it was at its debut last fall at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The 120 paintings originally displayed have been whittled to 81, the 23 sculptures to 10, the 10 drawings to none. With certain caveats, the show is stronger for the editing.

On the down side, only one of the important “brush-stroke” paintings begun in 1965 is on view at MOCA; yet, these ironic paeons to the gorgeous slathers and drips of Abstract Expressionism form the clearest, most succinct summation of a central thread of Lichtenstein’s art. Meanwhile, the strangely beautiful (and typically underestimated) pictures of the surfaces of mirrors are not shown to full advantage.

Happily, however, relatively few of the trims in the show date to the remarkable five-year period when Lichtenstein began to discover his artistic voice by adapting modern comic-strip style to the musty cliches of Abstract Expressionist rhetoric. Nearly half the paintings and sculptures in the 30-year retrospective date from 1961 to 1965.

While some great examples from those fecund years are sorely missed, the 43 on view make for an extraordinarily compelling array. “Look Mickey” (1961), Lichtenstein’s first all-cartoon canvas, begins the survey with a pointed fusillade.

The painting uses its blunt, red-yellow-blue primaries to fashion a slyly hilarious riff on artistic solipsism. As Mickey Mouse looks on with bemusement, a typically wild-eyed Donald Duck raves hysterically about the giant fish he thinks he’s caught on the other end of his tugging fish line. All the while, Donald is completely unaware that the whopper is in fact inside his own coattail, which he’s neatly hooked behind his back.

The reigning Expressionist faith in a self that can know only its own experiences, its own states of being, is given the boot in this surgically incisive image. The “big, American themes” grandly associated in the 1950s with the muscular, aggressive expanses of Abstract Expressionist painting here come apart at the seams, while the bigger, even more American theme of popular culture takes center stage.

Abstraction, then acclaimed as the peak of a long, Modernist road to artistic heights, gives way to vintage Disney and the Sunday funnies. In a famous magazine article, the volatile Abstract Expressionist painters had been dubbed “The Irascibles,” and who in the pop culture pantheon is more irascible than Donald Duck?

In the lexicon of traditional art, a cartoon is a spontaneous, preparatory study for a sleekly finished painting. It was the crudeness of such cartoons to which Impressionist canvases had been derisively compared nearly a century before, when a modern sensibility erupted. Lichtenstein, a mature 38 in 1961, was again restoring a sense of urgency to a contemporary artistic milieu gone stale and wan.

Look, Mickey! The usual claims for a primacy of feeling being more truly recorded in abstract rather than figurative art have gotten deliciously upended!

Like Andy Warhol, Lichtenstein surveyed the tired, restrictive and overworked terrain of American avant-garde art in his risible Pop paintings of the early ‘60s. In “Drowning Girl,” a brunette goes under for the count, swirling in an abstract tidal-pool of paint. De Kooning’s notorious pictures of women become comic-strip blonds, overcome with existential anxiety.

Painting as autobiography is shown as an unexpressive list of jottings in an ordinary appointment book. Elsewhere, the cover to a high school composition book recalls Pollock’s dark, jagged gestures in black automobile paint.

In dazzling war-comic images of fighter planes, the battle over abstraction’s stranglehold on contemporary art is addressed. “Okay, hot-shot, okay! I’m pouring!” screams a fighter pilot in a burst of machine-gun fire, wittily mowing down critic Clement Greenberg’s contemporaneous dissertations, which promoted the so-called “poured abstractions” of Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler.

Needless to say, once the battle was won and Pop art stood triumphant, Lichtenstein couldn’t keep fighting a vanquished foe. His art wobbles a bit, especially in big, 1968 canvases based on Art Deco designs of the 1920s and 1930s.

Their significance lies primarily in focusing on the most popular American artistic style when mass culture was being born--a style that lives on nostalgically today. Audience taste is their subject, while the relationship between audience and art is incisively (and melancholically) considered in Lichtenstein’s next major body of work.

The mirror paintings (1969-71) apply mass-graphic style to effectively represent the shiny, silvered surfaces of variously shaped looking glasses. Their most disorienting quality is the utter absence of a reflected image. Like Dracula, you stand full-bodied before these Pop mirrors, yet you cannot see your apparently deadened, bloodless self.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and continuing to the present, Lichtenstein widened his scope from the urgent, Abstract Expressionist focus of his early work. All of Modern painting has since become grist for his image mill: Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism, Surrealism--these and more are quoted.

So is architecture, specifically the entablatures supported by columns on classical buildings. Lichtenstein’s are pointedly Neoclassical, however, and therein lies a key to his post-Pop art. For just as Neoclassical artists of any revolutionary age--including powerful moments in the 11th, 15th, 17th and 19th centuries--have built their work on classical foundations, so does he.

The difference is that, for Lichtenstein, it is the classics of Modernism, not of antiquity, that are the columns holding up the entablature of his art. (In 1988 he made a failed attempt to paint the Laocoon, the famous Roman copy of a 1st-Century Greek sculpture beloved of the Renaissance; fortunately, it’s not in the show.) Since at least 1972, his own “classic Pop” works of the ‘60s have also turned up as sources, represented within new paintings much the way Matisse showed his own paintings in the backgrounds of new work.

In moments of great upheaval, such as our own, Neoclassicism means to suggest a stable continuity with the past. By also showing how far we’ve come since then, the unique importance of the present is punctuated.

And yet, when the distant mists of antiquity are replaced by the pressing realities of the modern world, as Lichtenstein has done, something else intrudes. A sobering sense that perhaps we haven’t come so very far at all reverberates through this beautifully skeptical show.

* Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., (213) 626-6222, through April 3. Closed Mondays.