The painting on top of the heap
To see why American Pop hit like a thrown brick, you have to know what it was thrown at. In the New York of the 1950s the most serious painting in the world was Abstract Expressionism (the first art movement America could call its own, which pulled the center of the art world from Paris to New York). It was huge, abstract and made entirely of feeling: Jackson Pollock poured and flung house paint across canvas on the floor; Mark Rothko stacked enormous soft rectangles of glowing color; Willem de Kooning slashed at the canvas until a woman’s face half-emerged from the violence. Hot, gestural, heroic and deadly serious, and under all of it ran one faith: real art comes from inside the artist, poured out raw, and the painter is a lone genius wrestling his own soul onto the wall. (The Abstract Expressionism read tells that story; here it is the giant Pop had to knock over.)
That faith had hardened into an orthodoxy, and orthodoxies invite revolt. The first cracks came from two slightly older New Yorkers who loved the everyday world too much to leave it out. They are filed under Neo-Dada (literally “new Dada,” art reviving the old Dada trick of dragging real objects and found images back into fine art), and they are the bridge: the door from Abstract Expressionism that Pop would walk through.
A flag that is only a flag
The quieter was Jasper Johns, and the picture that broke the spell was a flag. Between 1954 and 1955 he painted Flag, the Stars and Stripes, life-size, filling the whole canvas with nothing else, no sky, no pole, no story. Abstract Expressionism insisted a painting be a window into the artist’s inner life; Johns picked the single most familiar, flattest public image he could think of (one that is already a flat design before anybody paints it) and painted that. A flag is not a feeling. He even painted it in encaustic (pigment mixed into hot wax) over scraps of newspaper, so the surface up close is thick, handmade and lovingly textured while the image it adds up to stays as impersonal as the flag on a post-office wall. Is it a painting of a flag, or just a flag? Johns will not say, and that refusal is the seed of Pop.
A bed on the wall
The louder was Robert Rauschenberg, Johns’s friend and studio neighbor, who attacked the same orthodoxy from the opposite direction. He dragged actual three-dimensional junk into the picture and coined a word for the result: the combine (a work that combines painting with real found objects bolted, glued or hung onto it, half-painting, half-sculpture). The one to picture is Bed (1955): he took his own bedding, a quilt, a sheet, a pillow, hung it upright on the wall like a canvas, and splashed paint down it in a way that looks deliberately exactly like a Pollock. He keeps Abstract Expressionism’s gestural paint, but pours it onto the most intimate ordinary object in any life, and the spell breaks. Real life is back in the painting, literally stitched into it.
None of this went down quietly. The critic Clement Greenberg, the most powerful voice in American art, had spent years arguing Abstract Expressionism was the high point of all painting, and to him dragging a flag or a bed back into a picture looked like a betrayal, a step back into the ordinary world serious painting had finally escaped. But hold Johns and Rauschenberg side by side and the hinge is clear: Abstract Expressionism looked inward at the soul; these two turned the painting back outward, toward the shared, ordinary, public world. They reopened the door between art and the everyday object, and through it, in 1962, walked Andy Warhol, still paying his bills drawing shoe ads, about to push the cool, flat and mechanical further than either of them dared.