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ICONIC IRONIC
By William Paton
Pop may be short for 'popular', but it also captures the immediacy of the way Pop Art hits you.
Images adopted from our consumer culture or invented using idioms from advertising leave a sense of recognition that is strong and sudden. With this clear debt to advertising, it is unsurprising that so many Pop artists had careers at one time or another in that field.
Using this immediacy, Lichtenstein's Woman with Peanuts completely disarms the viewer. She seems to be inviting us into the painting, selling her wares. However, this advert is displaced, all the details and product specifics have been removed, and Lichtenstein presents us with a big, bold image of modern life. A visual pirate, he has playfully plundered a picture from popular culture and blown it up, enshrined it in oils. He has made an everyday image the subject of high art.
The controlled manner Lichtenstein used to create his paintings, with stenciled lines and flat planes of color mimicking a print process, was a stark contrast—and even an ironic reaction to—the Abstract Expressionism dominating American art during the 1960s.
Similarly, the exquisitely rendered trompe l'oeil liquid writing in Ed Ruscha's Mint seems like a jab at Jackson Pollock's drip paintings. Ruscha, rather than resort to images, saw the innate power of words in art and advertising. They imprint themselves in the viewer's mind, transmitting information in an intense and automatic way. They are the languages that we speak yet also, as signs, punctuate and define whole deserted swathes of the American landscape.
Discussing his relationship to Pop Art, Ruscha stated that 'The term Pop Art made me nervous and ambivalent… It actually goes beyond painting. It was culture, and it was so many other modes of making art… A Pop artist can be anyone who has thrown over a recent set of values.'
This certainly applies to the way Lichtenstein and he turned prevalent artistic values on their heads, but could equally apply to Jeff Koons, whose adaptation of found objects and the kitsch marked a revolution in the early 1980s. An infectious wit invariably marks his work, which often revels in its deliberate gaudiness.
Vase of Flowers is a shameless sprawl of florid mirror-work, Koons presenting a saccharine subject matter in a ritzy, decorative manner. Like his china images of Michael Jackson or of babies, Vase of Flowers combines a deluxe yet outmoded medium and a classical subject matter, harnessing an intense irony that forces viewers to reconsider, as with Pop art, all their received understandings of taste, values and misplaced reverence towards high culture.
William Paton, Researcher, Christie's 19th & 20th Century Art Department, London
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ROY LICHTENSTEIN (1923-1997)
Sale 1301, Lot 41
Woman with Peanuts, 1962
Oil and graphite on canvas
Estimate: $2,500,000-3,500,000
ED RUSCHA (b. 1937)
Sale 1301, Lot 43
Mint (Red), 1968
Oil on canvas
Estimate: $1,200,000-1,800,000
JEFF KOONS (b. 1955)
Sale 1301, Lot 53
Vase of Flowers, 1988
Mirror
Estimate: $450,000-550,000
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