"The Pop Years" - art, Centre National d'Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou

CENTER GEORGES POMPIDOU, PARIS

There is, it seems, no definitive way of organizing a Pop art exhibition. No lineup was ever official, even in the United States, nor was there a roster of participating countries, and some accounts have managed inexplicably to exclude even the movement's major pioneers, as with the 1992-93 "Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition" at LA's Museum of Contemporary Art, which left out Tom Wesselmann. Every fresh look at the subject seems to expand its parameters in another direction, and the impulse for curators to cast a wide net--or, conversely, to focus on local varieties--though understandable, is potentially hazardous. Where does one find a balance? Americans often wrongly assume the movement to have been contained within their country's borders, or based solely in Manhattan from 1960 to '65, exemplified by the work of the usual suspects--Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, Claes Oldenburg, and Wesselmann. Indeed, as early as the '50s, British artists Peter Blake, Richard Hamilton, and Eduardo Paolozzi were examining the iconography that would later characterize Pop, yet they have frequently been excluded from American accounts. The Menil Collection's recent "Pop Art: US/UK Connections, 1956-1966" was, remarkably, the first major exhibition on American soil to present the two countries' offerings on equal terms.

Despite the long-standing need for a corrective, the Pompidou's roundup, "Les annees pop" (The Pop years), goes a little too far in its revisionism, not just by over stating the French contribution (mainly at the expense of the British) but by including much work that is only tangentially related to Pop concerns. The very title of the exhibition, emphasizing the period rather than the movement, betrays the intentions of curator Catherine Grenier and her team. Their main claim to expanded coverage is a substantial section devoted to architecture, which perhaps should have been presented as a small show in its own right, and a less persuasive sprinkling of furniture and design, from Tupperware containers to a baby's plastic bath and potty by Luigi Colani. Given the constraints of space, with works hung cheek by jowl throughout, it seems misguided to have taken on so much. A selection of badly worn album covers and a scattering of posters does little justice to the vitality of graphic art during the '60s; the curators' fragmentary knowledge of this area of music and design is obvious from the inclusion of progressive-rock titles (e.g., Pink Floyd) at the expense of rock 'n' roll, just as the piped-in exhibition sound track of The Searchers and the 13th Floor Elevators betrays a hopeless misunderstanding of the musical climate. The curators are on surer ground only when links to artists can be directly documented, as with the Beatles LP covers designed by Blake and Hamilton, or the Velvet Underground performances as part of Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable.

The exhibition layout, a series of inter connecting alleys and spaces, adds to the confusion. Visitors are repeatedly taken down winding paths that turn out to be dead ends; this sense of art leading nowhere becomes an unfortunate leitmotif, sending out a powerful message quite different from what was intended. The organizers' ambition in allowing visitors to meander at will was clearly to re-create the atmosphere of limitless possibilities associated with the '60s, but the result is a jumble rather than a well-judged clash of visual signs and languages, and the lack of any overarching historical, geographical, or even conceptual framework is distinctly unhelpful. Spectators are constantly asked to readjust their expectations as they wander from small sections devoted to particular bands of artists to cross-cultural thematic groupings and to mini solo exhibitions; Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Oldenburg, Hamilton, Martial Raysse, and Alain Jacquet are among those rightfully singled out, but no such spaces are devoted to others equally deserving, such as Warhol, Lichtenstein, Wesselmann, Edward Ruscha, and Blake. Some major artists, represented by only a work or two, are thus rendered almost invisible. Why is Colin Self's sinister, haunting sculpture Leopardskin Nuclear Bomber No. 2, 1963, tucked away under two Hockney paintings in the early British section, where it seems sadly stranded, rather than shown alongside other images of war in the area devoted to political imagery? Why is Allen Jones's provocative 1969 sculpture of a woman on her back, in the form of a chair, installed next to Bernard Rancillac's sculpturally fanciful but functional Elephant Chair of 1966 and displayed in such an unkempt state?

Even the most instructive thematic section, devoted to the comic strip as a source of imagery, is aesthetically jarring in its disregard for scale, medium, and technique; however effective the works might be as illustrations in a book or as slides in a lecture, they kill each other on the walls. But having taken this route, with the inclusion of a section on advertising and another on utopian dreams and political protest (incongruously mixing Malcolm Morley's Beach Scene, 1968, and a Hockney swimming-pool painting, Sunbather, 1966, with agitprop posters of May '68), Grenier and her colleagues might have been better off rehanging the entire show thematically. With the works already selected, for example, they could have brought together Raysse with Mimmo Rotella's Marilyn, 1962, Peter Phillips's For Men Only--Starring MM and BB, 1961, Hamilton's My Marilyn, 1965, and Warhol's Shot Sage Blue Marilyn, 1964, as part of a group of celebrity and cinematic images as diverse in their emotional tone as in the processes by which they were achieved, making use of screenprinting, overpainted photographs, hand-painting, collage, and decollage.