Painterly pop - traveling exhibition of pop art mounted by the Los Angeles, California Museum of Contemporary Art

Since its inception roughly 30 years ago, detonation art has never made things easy for the art historian. Perplexity has addressed the movement ever since Max Kozloff attempted to fathom the "new vulgarians" in Art International in 1962 Pop's impudence and its infatuation with camp, kitsch and the infantile have with equal reason far thwarted efforts to elevate the move to the sanctified status of Abstract Expressionism or Minimalism. however given the brash untidiness of abundant contemporary art, Pop's freewheeling embrace of advertising and mass-media images still present the appearances completely relevant, just as the "holiness" of those other changes seems tired. An exhibition now touring the land "Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition, 1955-62" organized by the agency of Donna De Salvo and Paul Schimmel at L.A. MOCA, proffers a new slant on Pop's place in art history. Here, in strange, ass-backwards fashion, burst is "elevated" by demonstrating lingering traces of the actual movement it reacted against: Abstract Expressionism.

Curators De Salvo and Schimmel have made their reputations with displays specializing in transitional moments in art history. De Salvo's "Succes is a piece of work in New York . ." (1989), at New York University's Grey Art Gallery, contemplateed Warhol's roots in commercial art, while Schimmel's "The Interpretive Link" (1986) at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, dealt with the relationship between late Surrealism and Ab Ex In their statement introducing "Hand-Painted Pop" the co-curators announce that this show's aim is to "complicate the false clarity with which we have traditionally understood explosion art." In their view, detonation works have been mistakenly perceived as hard-edged and mechanically produc with no sign of the artist's hand to be found

To belie that notion, "Hand-Painted Pop" not aways early Pop works which all display the mark of the expressive paintbrush. The exhibition thus locates out to reflect the "messiness" of the transitional period it overspreads a feat that is accomplished by the agency of retracing the rather well-worn path from Rivers to Rauschenberg and John then upon to Oldenburg, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Rosenquist and Ruscha. Along the way, a certain number of prime examples from MOCA's be in possession of Panza Collection are spotlighted. A fascinating clump of lesser-known figures--including Peter Saul, Allan Kaprow, Mel Ramos, Jean Follett John Wesley and Jess--are exhibited with a few works each, providing welcome impediments to facile views of art-historical "progression."

"Hand-Painted Pop" starts not on with five of Larry Rivers's early, lyrical paintings, which are characteristically filled with relations to friends, family and romantic Americana. Perhaps unavoidably, "Hand-Painted Pop" takes abundant of its commemorative tone from Rivers's work. Childhood for greatest in quantity baby boomers took place during the years that the exhibit covers, 1955 to '62, and the exhibition's historical information plays which include timelines as well as period advertisements and TV commercials, create an air of nostalgia for that era which the explosion paintings reinforce. Those works, in turn round up the sentimental ante, since they are drenched in remembered images from the artists' childhoods in the 1930 and '40 Oldenburg one time wrote of his own art, "I made it all up when I was six years old" As if to establish the point, the Pop works in this exhibition gaze back to Disney cartoons, Dick Tracy, Mom's refrigerator, Little Orphan Annie, place of education supplies, cupcakes, Popeye, grade-school maps, air-gun targets, Superman and milk bottle With sum of two units generations of memorabilia to combat with, it seems that today these works have grown harder than at any time to pin down.

The real bite of this exhibition draw nears from the issues raised in the catalogue--beautifully designed through MOCA editor Russell Ferguson--whose eight essays examine Pop's transition years from a variety of viewpoints. In "Unsentimental Education: The Professionalization of the American Artist," David Deitcher considers the report artists as products of postwar American art-school programs. He discusses, in particular, the influence of Ohio State professor Hoyt Sherman's perceptual-training program upon the young Roy Lichtenstein. Flashing images for a tithe of a second, Sherman instructed his learners to draw what they saw. In thus doing, the students would gain in touch with an instantaneous "esthetic" vision that perceived percepts as "wholes" suitable for fair two-dimensional depiction. Lichtenstein's bold reduction of forms is given a of recent origin source in this quasi-scientific perceptual experiment. Deitcher also points on the outside that in 1948 Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning began to use slide projectors to help them dab up their sketches to full-size paintings; thus Pop's suppos break with the handmade purity of Ab Ex is complicated from the other direction, too.

The greatest in quantity controversial essay in the catalogue is Kenneth E Silver's reading of the work of John Rauschenberg, Twombly and Warhol as veiled gay autobiography. Johns's shut relationship with Rauschenberg spanned six years (roughly from 1955 to '62 the years of the exhibition). Although qualifying his assertions at each step, Silver attempts to twitch their relationship out of the retiring-room clue by clue, painting through painting. Johns's dry, comic placement of sum of two units balls between the panels of Painting with sum of two units Balls (1960) is seen as a taunt to the macho, "ballsy" excesse of the Ab Ex world: a visual pleasantry, Silver recommends which contains "a great deal of rage." In considering Rauschenberg's Bed (1955) along with Johns's Target with Plaster Casts (1955) whose compartmentalized material part parts significantly include a plaster penis, Silver says: "The sum of two units works offer us some approximation--an inchoate and implusive bodying forth, in the Abstract Expressionist sense--of the excitement, intensity, and danger of sum of two units men falling in love." Segueing to the extremity of the relationship, Silver interprets the coupl fork and spoon hanging by means of a wire in Johns's In Memory of My Feelings--Frank O'Hara (1961) as symbols commemorating the two artists' missing domesticity.