Pop Goes the Circle

Thirteen years ago this week, the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened the exhibition “Andy Warhol: A Retrospective.” It was a landmark event. Not for Warhol, but for MOMA.

Warhol had died almost exactly two years before--a tragically unnecessary demise, it turned out, from poorly tended complications following routine gall bladder surgery. (He was only 59.) The show was a very big deal for MOMA because it signaled an unmistakable shift in attitude for the dowager empress of modern art museums.

Pop art in general, and Warhol in particular, had always been eyed by MOMA with, if not hostility, at least a certain frosty skepticism. Frank Stella, Warhol’s junior by eight years, had already been the subject of not one but two retrospective surveys there--but then, Stella was upholding the Modern’s old, dull commitment to pure abstraction as painting’s highest value. By 1989, that fustian sentiment seemed positively quaint.

By the end of the 1980s, figurative Neo-Expressionist painting had explosively come and gone. Photography that approached the scale and power traditionally associated with painting was on the rise. Current art made in Europe, where collectors had embraced American Pop with the same fervor that Americans once brought to their embrace of French Impressionism when it was new, had returned to center stage after decades of postwar isolation. Los Angeles, the city that virtually defined pop culture for America and the world, was similarly consolidating its position as a center for the production of new art. Warhol’s work could be cited as a precedent in connection with all these developments.

The Modern’s Warhol retrospective was both an exhibition and a public announcement. It said the museum knew how out of touch it had become with important currents of contemporary art and that its future would be different.

In December, L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art announced that it would be hosting a Warhol retrospective. (It’s scheduled to open May 25 for a three-month run.) Organized by the New National Gallery in Berlin, where it was warmly received in the fall, and set to open Feb. 14 in London at the Tate Modern, the show has a different meaning for MOCA today than the earlier retrospective did for MOMA. It signals a certain stature for the young museum.

In 1989, MOCA had tried hard to get MOMA’s Warhol retrospective--but to no avail. The show didn’t travel farther west than Chicago, where it was seen at the venerable Art Institute. Failure to snag the important show was hugely disappointing.

Warhol’s first gallery exhibition of Pop paintings had taken place in L.A., where in July 1962 the New York artist showed the landmark series of 32 Campbell’s soup can paintings at the old Ferus Gallery on La Cienega Boulevard. (A rival gallery across the street answered Warhol’s refreshingly rude exhibition by displaying a stack of actual Campbell’s soup cans in its window.) “New Paintings of Common Objects,” the first American museum exhibition of Pop art, was organized that fall by the Pasadena Museum of Modern Art (now the Norton Simon Museum), and in 1970, Pasadena also organized Warhol’s first big museum survey, which traveled internationally. Bringing the full Warhol retrospective from MOMA to MOCA would have closed a circle.

MOCA was a very young museum in 1989, though. (Its Grand Avenue building had opened barely two years earlier.) Since then MOCA has built quite a track record of historical exhibitions. The museum has organized the more difficult, wide-ranging historical surveys of critical developments in contemporary art that one might have expected MOMA to tackle in its effort to catch up with things current. A history of Conceptual art, the pivotal issue of representation in a society awash in reproductions, performance gestures that result in objects, the transition between expressive painting by hand and the mass media world of Pop--these and other MOCA exhibition topics have been distinctive. They made for the sort of must-see shows of postwar art history that virtually none among the other American museums of contemporary art even attempts. (Next in this impressive line is an eagerly anticipated survey of Minimalist art, set for 2003.)

The new Warhol retrospective will arrive at MOCA on the 40th anniversary of the Ferus and Pasadena shows. A lot has happened since then--not just for art, but for art museums too. The announcement of the MOCA show came at a news conference attended by journalists, television cameras, radio microphones and the mayor, an unusual if not unprecedented event for the museum. It’s being partly sponsored by the city, and no one at the news conference could recall a prior instance of city funding for an art museum show. The Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau is on board and, in conjunction with American Express and 10 participating hotels, intends to market the exhibition aggressively to out-of-towners. (Similar involvement with the 1999 exhibition “Van Gogh’s Van Goghs” netted $7 million for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.) The show is MOCA’s first major foray into the economic realm of cultural tourism.

In a way, that’s something else that has come full circle. Art historian Irving Sandler once pointed out that art museums underwent a significant alteration in the 1960s, and that Pop was critical to the change.

That was the moment museum directors and curators--unlike their predecessors--actively began to interact with the art world. The art that came to characterize the 1960s was partly introduced in 1959 in “Sixteen Americans,” curator Dorothy C. Miller’s famous MOMA show of Neo-Dada (Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, etc.) and Post-Painterly Abstraction (Stella, Ellsworth Kelly). By 1962--within a year of Pop art’s emergence in commercial galleries--the work was being surveyed at the Pasadena Museum. The following spring it was featured in museum shows in New York, Kansas City, Mo., Houston and Washington. A year after that, a sequel to a Pop show at the Guggenheim in New York turned up at LACMA, and other Pop exhibitions appeared in cities as far-flung as Oakland and Buffalo.

Of course, this was not the first time art museums in America had shown very new art, but it was the first time they had done so on such a big scale. Intimate involvement with contemporary art quickly became the norm for museums. Increasingly, the shows they organized reflected up-to-the-minute art world opinion. Today we take that condition for granted, but in the history of museums it was actually a long time coming. Pop art made the art museum pop, and things haven’t been the same since.

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Christopher Knight is The Times’ art critic.