Roy Lichtenstein is the perennial prince charming of Pop Art. His work appeals as much to the man on the street as it does to the art world aficionado, crossing social boundaries as befits a movement that was at once the yuppie and the slumlord of Modernism. But while most Pop had some kind of dark side – whether in the form of coded critique or banality-embracing nihilism – Lichtenstein was always too suave and aloof for any kind of existentialism.

He had an unquenchable propensity to please and tease with chirpy primary colors, slick design, and elaborate games of flatness versus illusion. His early work borrowed directly from advertising and comic books, though he had a genius for traveling light when making off with vernacular language. There is little by way of political or emotional baggage in the Ben Day dot, which he managed both to re-trademark as his own within a high art context, and to turn into a visual communication tool seemingly as inevitable as the cross hatch.

Lichtenstein, it seems, was just too cool for desire, sinister or otherwise. But once you get used to the comic strip, it is apparent that he was much more at home with the high than the low. And in his jousts with art of the past, this knowing trickster devoted much of his attention to Surrealism, supposedly the seething cauldron of desire, anarchy, and the irrational.

Lichtenstein’s dialogue with Surrealism is explored in a two-part exhibition at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, who are marking the opening of their new Chelsea gallery (they took over the lease from Gorney, Bravin & Lee, appointing Jay Gorney as a director). Included in the show are significant loans from MoMA, the Whitney, and the National Gallery of Art. As if symbolically extending a notion of an artist constantly subjected to barometers, his drawing and painting are divided between their uptown and downtown spaces. Gagosian, meanwhile, has also been hosting a sprawling show of sculptures that for the most part date from the moment in the 1970s when Lichtenstein focused on Surrealism.

Lichtenstein’s reworkings of Surrealist motifs underline the ambiguous relationship of Pop to Surrealism. The two movements certainly had plenty in common: a penchant for the populist, a desire to shock, a streak of subversion. But they can also be read as antitheses: Surrealism professed to be a revolutionary movement where Pop, ironically or not, seemed like art’s love affair with capitalism.

Critics of Surrealism could argue that Salvador Dali, dubbed Avida Dollars by the pope of the movement, Andre Breton, was the norm, the puritanical Breton the exception. In terms of technique, though, Surrealism, with its romantic appeal to the unconscious and the occult, vaunted “automatism” – the idea that images should be realized in an uninhibited delirium. Pop was the opposite, especially in Lichtenstein’s handling of materials: cool, deliberate, calculated, unemotional. Pop was also, of course, a drastic riposte to Abstract Expressionism, never more savagely than in Lichtenstein’s spoof De Koonings.

In works at Gagosian like “Brushstrokes in Flight” (1983) painted in bronze, the brushstrokes cavort as autonomous, animate entities. Lichtenstein revels in the conceit of taking emotionally redolent, gestural sweeps of the brush and rendering them in meticulously exact, cartoon outline. In “Profile Head V” (1988), an open form with a blonde’s upturned head denoted in a tapering line, the girl’s hair is a bravura cluster of such yellow strokes, set against the vacant face.

A central tenet of Surrealism was the discovery of the marvelous in the commonplace: Quotidian objects brought into unlikely juxtaposition could create an exalted state beyond the humdrum of bourgeois conventionality. Lichtenstein turned all that on its head, banalizing “masterpieces” and making other people’s art as ubiquitous as classified ads. But the results are vibrant and upbeat. It is as if he were saying the here-and-now of American corporate culture is marvelous enough.

“Landscape With Figures” (1977), represented in painting and drawing at the respective Mitchell-Innes & Nash venues, jams together a cacophony of motifs into an effortless, charming, decorative whole. The reclining amoeba-like figure with holes comes out of Picasso and Henry Moore. She is screened from the sun by a giant slice of swiss cheese, a joke about biomorphism. In the foreground a gentleman in red tie and handkerchief has two L-shaped rulers for a head. There is a wigwam on the horizon. As much as the image spoofs Surrealism, it also takes on Cubism, in the way it forces different spatial orders together and insists on flatness while rendering depth and dimension.

The enigma of Lichtenstein is that he just seems too nice to have been doing violence to art. But for all the chirpy images he put out, there is no question he was an anti-artist.

His paint is totally devoid of surface incident, and his paintings are spritely and sumptuous at the very moment they are vacuous and pernicious. In his drawings, everything arrives a priori: They are hardnosed, practical preparations for the paintings, but end up looking like caricatures rather than forms in evolution. There is an unexpected delicacy in the looser ones, like the drawing for “Nude on Beach” (1977), which is slightly under 6-by-4 inches in graphite and colored pencils. The tentative or perfunctory line doesn’t come across as intended delicacy so much as working shorthand for the slick, hard-edged effect to be had from parallel lines or, in other drawings, Ben Day dots.

The sculptures, too, are anti-sculpture: Almost every work insists on a fixed viewing point, affording a pictorial perspective. They effectively become graphic designs in space.

There are a few instances of collage, such as the red, loopy, Picassoid flower in a sketchpad study for “Figures in Landscape” (1977) that has been pasted into place, but this isn’t collage in any expressive sense. It is merely a way of moving an image into place. Besides, everything in Lichtenstein is collage.

Surrealism drawings until November 12 (1018 Madison Avenue between 78th and 79th Streets); Surrealism paintings from October 7 until November 12 (534 W. 26 Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-744-7400).