Munich — Not since Hitler laid the cornerstone of the
House of German Art in 1933 has Munich been known as much of a trailblazer on
the international art scene. In 1993, however, Christoph Vitali took over the
establishment, now called simply Haus der Kunst, and brought with him new
vitality. Mr. Vitali had already put one exhibition space on the map,
Frankfurt's Schirn Kunsthalle. Thanks to his expertise and connections, Munich
now hosts a caliber of traveling show that used to bypass southern Germany in
favor of Cologne, Hamburg or Berlin.
The best expression of the new wind blowing through the
city is the current blast of pop art. For the Haus der Kunst, Mr. Vitali
managed to get a piece of the Roy Lichtenstein action, a Munich stop (through
Jan. 8) on the grand tour of the retrospective that opened at the Guggenheim in
1993. He's even added a number of works that weren't shown in New York.
Following suit is another museum with another recently arrived director: The
Villa Stuck, headed since 1992 by Jo-Anne Birnie-Dansker, currently hosts the
Tom Wesselmann retrospective (through Jan. 15) traveling around Europe until
the end of 1996.
For Munich to have two major shows of this nature at once
is unprecedented. That they happen to coincide enables audiences here to take
what amounts to an in-depth crash course in this
Though Mr. Lichtenstein is seven years older than Mr.
Wesselmann, each artist arrived at his characteristic idiom around 1961. In
Munich, the works that weren’t shown in New York include Lichtensteins from the
1950s in which the artist searches, with increasingly wandering brush strokes,
for a certainty he finds only when he hits upon existing cultural icons.
There’s a new strength and energy to, for instance, a 1958 ink sketch of Donald
Duck. We see that Mr. Lichtenstein has found his voice: not an image, but a
full vocabulary of representation.
This language is, above all, two-dimensional. But an
idiom that the public imagination tends to reduce to an image of comic-book
rapture is really an attempt to show how conventions of representation affect
all our perceptions. Using his print screens and dots to filter both the world
and the art-historical past, Mr. Lichtenstein looks at the way the modern eye
flattens Picasso, Mondrian, Cezanne into mere reproductions — symbols that are
the coin of a devalued cultural currency. This is one of the central themes of
pop art: Warhol, too, pointed to the way that the “Mona Lisa” or “The Last
Supper” has ceased to be a painting and has instead become an icon for a large
segment of the public.
To put him in a conventional art-historical slot, Mr.
Lichtenstein is a narrative painter, but his comic-book scenes are fragments of
stories to which there is no beginning and no end. This hardly matters: The
moments he selects are representative, not even so much of the shallow characters
as of the society that has produced them. These works also invoke a convention
of narration that reduces a story to its superficial, surface elements.
But eventually surface concerns take over altogether.
When Mr. Lichtenstein began painting empty mirrors in the early ’70s, he
brushed content and subject right out of the picture. The paintings of the next
two decades show him struggling to find a way back in. He returns to allusions,
citing everyone from the surrealists to — in a period of particular yearning
for solidity — de Kooning; he falls back on the time-honored device of the
artist's studio, which lets him quote from himself. The limitations of surface
are best expressed in the series of “Imperfect Paintings” from the late ’80s —
the rectangular picture plane is no longer able to sustain the compositions,
which have to be supported on irregular
Mr. Wesselmann is a much happier artist than is Mr.
Lichtenstein, and more fluent in his medium. Evident throughout his oeuvre is
his delight in the physicality of paint, metal, plastic. Like Mr. Lichtenstein,
Mr. Wesselmann focuses on surface, but his surfaces are above all tactile,
sensuous. The nexus of themes central to this work is sexuality, at once
voluptuous and sanitized, the “safer sex” of advertising images. Mr.
Wesselmann's platform is the billboard; instead of narratives, he paints still
lifes and landscapes, nudes and altarpieces to the American Dream.
Surface also functions as a screen for the viewer’s own
projections of that dream. The earliest “Great American Nudes” are flat,
featureless, even amorphous pink shapes lounging on draperies of Matissean
brilliance -- their surfaces gradually develop into the desirable but equally
anonymous gleaming curve of a car body, a breast. From the mid-’80s on, the
white space surrounding the nudes becomes the ground on which Mr. Wesselmann
inscribes sketches of brightly enameled metal: pretty, colorful, facile images
of nudes, still lifes. The images are tasteful and marketable; indeed, they've
been on sale at two Munich galleries since 1992.
As his works scale down, Mr. Wesselmann steps up his
quotations: “Monica Sitting With Mondrian“ or “Nude With Cezanne,” even
“Bedroom Face With Lichtenstein.” Like Mr. Lichtenstein years before, Mr.
Wesselmann is making a statement about the way famous images are reduced to
reproductions, or, here, to background.
But in the end, Messrs. Wesselmann’s and Lichtenstein’s
works are just as vulnerable as are any of the Old Masters to the process of
being reduced to reproduction — more so, in fact, because pop images are
already executed in the vocabulary of reproduction. And time has dulled the
force of their message. These pretty pictures no longer stir up their audience,
no longer pose a threat to lazy viewing habits. The works of Messrs. Wesselmann
and Lichtenstein have become commodities, repossessed by the idiom of
reproduction and mass-production — T-shirts, wall calendars and mugs — about
which these two artists were originally making a statement.