Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-To-Reel Collection “Cubism As Pop Art” by Robert Rosenblum, 1976
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Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Cubism as Pop Art” by Robert Rosenblum, 1976 FEMALE 1 Yup. This goes around your neck. And just figure out what we’re going to do about it. ROBERT ROSENBLUM (inaudible) FEMALE 1 [Mod?]. All right. ROBERT ROSENBLUM (inaudible). FEMALE 1 That’s really it — wait — ROBERT ROSENBLUM Yeah. Because I’m getting sort of — FEMALE 1 Let’s have a — a reading on the sound levels, please? ROBERT ROSENBLUM Does this sound like the right volume? Can everyone hear me? Fore and aft, front and back, side to side? [00:01:00] FEMALE 2 Good evening and welcome. Robert Rosenblum’s extraordinarily wide-ranging contributions to our understanding of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century art are far too extensive to be even cursorily summarized here. They are characterized, on the one hand, by formidable erudition, and on the other, by exceptional, and seemingly effortless, lucidity. Most striking of all, perhaps, is their breadth of view. They force one to look back at unsuspected sources for an artist’s style, and forward to often unexpected consequences of his influence. In his book on cubism, for instance, Robert Rosenblum dealt not only with that style itself, but with its assimilation and reflection in the work of Chagall, Klee, Malevich, Marc, and others. In Transformations, [00:02:00] he dealt not only with the virtually unchartered and continually changing notion of Neoclassical style, but also made connections between the art of Blake and Braque, Ankha, and Matisse, and Flaxman, and the later masters of abstraction. In his most recent book, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition, Mr. Rosenblum takes a strikingly original and even — in his words — “eccentric northern route” and poses a fundamental challenge to traditional conceptions of the entire history of modern painting. In the mid-1960s, Robert Rosenblum was the first to probe and elucidate the complex wit and humor that lay behind the use of lettering in cubist collage. And at about the same time, he was also one of the first to recognize the importance of pop art and to carefully define the characteristics [00:03:00] of its style. It’s singularly appropriate, therefore, that he, with his uncanny ability to make unexpected connections, would choose to speak today on cubism as pop Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 1 of 13 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Cubism as Pop Art” by Robert Rosenblum, 1976 art. It’s with special anticipation and pleasure that I welcome and introduce Robert Rosenblum. (applause) ROBERT ROSENBLUM Well, I’ll have to try to live up to that, but I can do it at least nominally by talking about the subject announced in my title, “Cubism as Pop Art,” which I hope is [00:04:00] a surprising juxtaposition. And I will try to defend by, to begin with, some sweeping generalizations. The first generalization occurred in this building about four years ago. I think it was in 1972 when the Guggenheim Museum had an exhibition of Nero, except that it was a Nero exhibition, the likes of which no one had ever seen or proposed before. Namely, it dealt exclusively with works of the ’20s and the ’60s in Nero’s oeuvres. And suddenly, one had a curious déjà-vu feeling about Nero, namely, that, at times, as in pictures like this one on the right [slide] he could even anticipate, as the show demonstrated, [00:05:00] the Color Field painting of the 1960s, which I exemplify in the Olitski on the left. The generalization I have in mind is an old one — I think T.S. Eliot wrote about it — which has to do with the fact that all new works of art drastically change — especially if they’re important works of art — our perceptions of the past that, again, can be exemplified in the way that, say, Frank Stella — sticking to the ’60s, which is where pop art is going to be located — that Frank Stella changed our views of the history of abstract painting. For instance, the Delaunay that you see on the right -– and there are better examples along the ramps upstairs -– is a Delaunay of the 1930s, and it’s the kind of picture that probably, until the 1960s, was rather undervalued in favor of his early work. [00:06:00] But with the advent of artists like Stella, Hard-edge, color abstraction, and so on, in the ’60s, these pictures of the ’30s suddenly began to have a fresh luster. They looked newly accessible, and they looked like works which somehow provided support for a newly constructed genealogical table in the history of twentieth-century art. The same thing, needless to say, occurred in the aspects of new minimal styles of the 1960s, so that suddenly -– in looking at works like these, say the Tony Smith sculpture, the cube, Die, on the left, of ’62, or a Don Judd, on the right, of 1968. In looking at these things, suddenly we wanted to chart a new ancestral table for the early evolution of twentieth-century art and, [00:07:00], well, for one thing, even Josef Albers, in the 1950s, began to loom a little larger as a sort of father figure, not to mention the fact that the later 1960s suddenly saw a whole flurry of research, interest, appreciation in the works of Malevich, which you see exemplified on the right, in a work — a black square on a white ground — whose dating is still a vexed issue, but is really thanks, I would say to the appearance of minimal styles in the ’60s that we can look with enthusiasm, interest, freshness, and so on, at these earlier twentieth-century prototypes. The same general point can be made in a confrontation like this, the Oldenburg, Soft Toilet, on the left, raises all sorts of questions [00:08:00] and it looked, to be sure, quite insolent, in the mid-’60s. But among the questions it raised, it was, again, some sort of ancestral table in earlier twentieth-century art, and lo and behold, among other people, the Salvador Dali, who is usually held in contempt with –- by serious-minded critics and historians – Salvador Dali seemed to be appropriate as artist who, before Oldenburg, began to make malleable, mushy, pliable, hard Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 2 of 13 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Cubism as Pop Art” by Robert Rosenblum, 1976 objects like the famous soft, Camembert-like watches in The Persistence of Memory, or looked at from yet another point of view, that of how to astonish the bourgeoisie, the Oldenburg toilet might be thought of in conjunction with certain Dada insolence such as the famous Duchamp Fountain, the urinal on its side, that [00:09:00] was proposed at an exhibition in this –- on this side of the Atlantic in 1917. New art always makes us look at old art, and if it’s good new art, or important new art, it makes us look at it in a very, very different way. I would say, for instance, that the appearance of Lichtenstein in the ’60s, once we got used to him, made us reconsider the style and the sources of Seurat, especially in his late work, of which I show you a detail out of The Circus on the right. Recent research, for instance, on Seurat has indicated that he was much influenced by the techniques of color reproduction of the 1880s, techniques of chromolithography and the use of, sort of, mass-produced blue, yellow, red dots in Seurat of [00:10:00] the period, 1889, ’90, ’91, suddenly seems to strike a shock of chord recognition in the use of Ben-Day Dots in the art of Lichtenstein of the ’60s, just as the dependence on the rather grotesque caricatures of the human form, such as you see in the clown head over here, suddenly has parallels in Lichtenstein’s adaptation of similar humanoid creatures from comic strips and the like. Again, even the work of Jasper Johns in the late ’50s and early ’60s, begin suddenly to reveal unexpected resonances in the very early twentieth century, especially within the domain of Analytic cubism. And the Johns Map on the left — with its fusion of shuffled graded planes [00:11:00] moving from dark to light, with the stenciled letters weaving in and out of these complicated spaces — suddenly this begins to look different in the context of an analytic cubist picture by Picasso, such as the 1912 work you see on your right. And that really brings us now to the –- have I lost my connection here? Well, maybe I’ll holler for them. That brings us to the proper subject of this lecture, which is really to explore a — somewhat more closely –- connections that I would like to find, or consider, between cubism and pop art. The general attitude toward cubism — the general preconception or prejudice about it — is that it is a [00:12:00] highly cerebral, ivory tower sort of art that has to do with the architecture of picture-making, and that seems to have been conceived and executed in a kind of ivory tower vacuum, rather remote from the contemporary world of Paris, where it was invented between, say, 1908 and ’12. That image is certainly borne out, underlined by many cubist works, such as the ravishingly intellectual, sort of conceptual, art piece that you have on the right, an analytic cubist drawing of 1910, or its rather, more, full realization in terms of this full length nude by — recently acquired by — the National Gallery in Washington.