Objects of their affection: Exhibit celebrates the best of American pop art

Thursday, May 15, 2003 | 8:14 a.m.

The Guggenheim Hermitage Museum opens its "American Pop Icons" exhibit today, featuring eight artists instrumental to the emergence and vitality of pop art.

The exhibit is arranged somewhat chronologically, beginning with Robert Rauschenburg and Jasper Johns, who were among the first to rebel against pretentious abstract expressionism and lead the way to the pop movement Rauschenburg by creating sculpture/painting assemblages from mixed materials, and Johns by adding objects and text to his art.

Also included are works by Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine and Tom Wesselmann.

Though Dine and Rosenquist did not consider themselves pop artists, and Rauschenberg and Johns have been incorrectly dubbed pop artists, exhibit curator Susan Davidson said "American Pop Icons" focuses on the artists' contribution to the movement's theme: everyday objects.

"All of these artists focused on painting particular objects, and that's what I've really tried to express in pulling the exhibit together," Davidson said. "In 28 paintings or less we get a concise view of what pop painting in the 1960s was and how it continues today."

The pop art movement began in London in the 1950s and flourished in New York City during the '60s. Often saturated with irony, it exploited, criticized and celebrated consumerism, popular culture and everyday objects through mass production and mechanical representations.

"American Pop Icons" is a takeoff of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum's 1963 pop exhibition, "Six Painters and the Object," held at that museum in New York City. Oldenburg and Wesselmann were added to the original six.

Oldenburg is best known for his large-scale hard sculptures and sagging stuffed soft sculptures from the 1960s, which include his light switches, food and the vinyl "Soft Pay-Telephone."

"Soft Pay-Telephone" is included in "American Pop Icons," along with his 1963 "Soft Light Switches Ghost Version,' " a sagging stuffed double light switch mounted on canvas.

Three of Wesselmann's still-life, mixed-media works are featured, including "Still Life # 34," an acrylic and reproduction piece that incorporates pop images such as a bottle of Coca-Cola, a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes, an ice cream float, a pear, a bouquet of roses and Diamond walnuts.

Most of the pieces featured in "American Pop Icons" are from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Collection and the Sonnabend Collection. A handful are from private collections, including three Wesselmann works from the Mugrabi Collection.

Rauschenberg's popular 1959 combine painting, "Canyon," belongs to the Sonnabend Collection.

Created from fabric, metal, cardboard, photographs, a paint tube, wood and a taxidermic bald eagle, among other items, "Canyon" is considered an ideal representation of the artist's sculpture/painting assemblages created using found objects, clothing, newspaper clippings, taxidermic animals and photographs.

"It's one of his most important combine paintings of the '50s," Davidson said.

"Canyon" was one of the last combine pieces to incorporate taxidermic animals and, Davidson said, "It's important for this exhibition because we're dealing with iconic imagery."

"Flags" (1987) is one of Johns' four pieces featured in the exhibit and a continuation of a series on the theme he began in the mid-1950s. Among the Lichtensteins are "Preparedness," an art-deco, wall-size oil on canvas depicting machinery and soldiers, and "Eddie Diptych," "Composition" and "Girl with Tear 1."

Rosenquist's "Balcony" and "Coentis Slip Studio" are featured, as well as his later works, "Time Stream" (1979), and "The Meteor Hits the Swimmer's Pillow" (1987).

Dine's pieces include "Pearls," "Shoe" and "Four Soap Dishes."

Dine is known more for his bathrobe and heart themes and "Happenings" (theatrically based performance events in which the audience was often involved), in which he participated with Oldenberg.

Completing "American Pop Icons" are five Warhol pieces, including Warhol's 1965 "Four Colored Campbell Soup Cans," "Orange Disaster #5" and two "Early Colored Liz" pieces.

The Warhols share attention with the Bellagio Gallery of Art across and down the Strip. Though Davidson said she hasn't seen the "Andy Warhol: The Celebrity Portraits" exhibit at the Bellagio, that and the Warhols in "Pop Icons" are complementary to one another.

Davidson joined the Guggenheim staff in June after spending 18 years at The Menil Collection in Houston.

She said she was approached last fall to curate this show. This is her fourth project for the Guggenheim. In 1998 she was the outside curator for the Rauschenberg show at the Guggenheim, with 462 works, one of the Guggenheim's largest.

The exhibit follows "Art Through the Ages," a hodgepodge of works by six centuries of Old Masters.

Regarding the current exhibit, Davidson said, "Jasper Johns' double 'Flags' is a wonderful iconic picture, the Lichtensteins, overall it's a pretty solid collection."