Pop Art, a Midcentury Phenomenon Spearheaded by Andy Warhol, Spirals Back Onto the Guggenheim’s Staircases

“Guggenheim Pop: 1960 to Now” gets the mid-century band back together for a retrospective focused on the intersection between the movement and the museum on Fifth Avenue. The show unfolds across four galleries across three floors. What the Guggenheim calls the exhibition’s “second phase” is planned for later this month. This show features the movement’s godfathers — Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein — as well as contemporary artists.Pop Art emerged in response to the oracular pretensions of Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning, men who dominated the post-World War II art world of New York. Pop thumbed its nose at the tradition of fine art by elevating ephemera from mass culture. The kitsch and everyday received a heady promotion from artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg — and eventually Warhol. Oldenburg’s “I Am For,” from 1961, is sometimes hailed as Pop Art’s constitution. He writes “I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all, an art given the chance of having a starting point of zero. I am for an art that embroils itself with everyday crap and still comes out on top. I am for all art that takes its form from the lines of life, that twists and extends impossibly and accumulates and drips and spits, and is sweet and stupid as life itself.”The mix of the sweet and stupid is the recipe from which Pop art often seems concocted. Two years after what Oldenburg called his “poetic ode” a curator at the Guggenheim, Lawrence Alloway, organized the first show at New York devoted to the nascent movement. The museum calls its collection “eccentric,” and the works on display here amount less to a full buffet than an omakase sampling that illustrates Pop’s delights and limitations.‘Orange Disaster #5,’ by Andy Warhol, 1963. Kristopher McKay for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New YorkThe headliner is “Soft Shuttlecock,” created by Oldenburg and his wife Coosje van Bruggen for a 1995 retrospective at the Guggenheim’s Frank Lloyd Wright-designed rotunda. The giant work — it looks like it was built for a friendly match pitting Titans against Olympians — has not been on view at New York in 25 years. Now, though, it is stuffed into its own gallery rather than looming in the lobby. It appears even bigger in cramped quarters.Another tentpole piece is one of Yayoi Kusama’s “infinity rooms.” The Japanese artist, now nearly a century old, has lived at a mental health facility since the 1970s. She has long resisted the Pop label, and her installation here is a strange kind of minimalism — a dark room, mirrored as far as the eye can see, with bright teardrop lights that resemble nothing so much as a God’s-eye view of the galaxy. Pollock’s brushstrokes give way to refracted refulgence.The most famous Pop artist of them all, Andy Warhol, is represented by a macabre “Orange Disasters #5.” Warhol, who once said that “I think somebody should be able to do all my paintings for me,” here reproduces an electric chair 15 times. The chair, alone in a room, is joined only by a sign that commands “SILENCE.” Warhol once reckoned that “When you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn’t really have any effect.”John Chamberlain’s “Dolores James” is a dynamic agglomeration of scrap metal and used automobile bodies, a three-dimensional translation of the swoops and swells that marked the canvases of de Kooning and Pollock — but here with a serrated edge that could slash skin. Chamberlain was so devoted a practitioner of what is sometimes called “Junk art” that in 1973 two enormous pieces of his were carted away to a junkyard after being mistaken for scrap.While Pop featured the frivolous, a connection to the Old Masters nevertheless lurks. Last month Christie’s sold, for some $4.5 million, Warhol’s “Last Supper.” The auction house writes that he “ritualistically spent an hour alone each day of the last year of his life detailing Leonardo da Vinci’s work to better understand his own.” Warhol made more than 100 works following the Florentine’s mural. Few debts have been so productively repaid. Has the Pop bubble burst? What once seemed avant garde now bears the distinct whiff of the past century. The rise of AI art has made Pop’s focus on the analogue — the knick-knacks and leftovers of mass culture — seem especially distant when reckoned alongside the digital. Much of Pop’s innovations were anticipated decades earlier by Marcel Duchamp. In the long run, art that eschews both seriousness and beauty would appear to court oblivion.

Pop Art, a Midcentury Phenomenon Spearheaded by Andy Warhol, Spirals Back Onto the Guggenheim’s Staircases

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