June 15, 1999

SCULPTURES BY ROYLICHTENSTEIN: FUN, FUN, FUN

By ROGER ANDERSON Scripps Howard News Service

Shortly after the close of World War II, America fell asleep and slept for a long, long time.

While sleeping, America had a very beautiful dream. It was a dream of a perfect world without hunger, sickness, danger or want.

The dream's environment was made up of smoothly produced graphic images - magazine advertisements, billboard displays, gleaming kitchens and baths, housing floor plans, glossy travel brochures, television commercials, comic-book panels.

Some of America's artists, known as Abstract Expressionists (Jackson Pollack, for instance), spent years trying furiously to wake America up from this dream. Other artists, like Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, thought sleeping wasn't such a bad thing - and that the dream America was having while it slept was fascinating and beautiful.

Just how fascinating and beautiful Lichtenstein deemed it is dramatically brought home in a brand-new exhibit of his wood and metal sculptures and related sketches at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. The show runs through Sept. 30.

Here, Lichtenstein, who died in 1997 at age 74, actually retrieves three-dimensional objects from the comic-book world that is his most famous metier as a painter.

What seems merely silly at first glance - what could be sillier, after all, than a painted wood representation of a stylized explosion you might find in a comic book? - proves to be irresistible fun, especially when he extends the concept and its execution to desk lamps and their cascades of light, or coffee cups and their billows of steam, or other innocuous objects as they are found in innocuous magazine and cartoon settings.

The actual sculptures are marvels of balance and design, of right proportion and skillfully handled materials.

Indeed, Lichtenstein's mastery is mind-boggling. It's one thing to come up with such silly ideas, but to design them, sketch them, cast them, assemble them, disassemble them, paint them and finally produce a finished piece that's just as fresh as the original thought is close to miraculous.

Each work feels as though it must have been conceived, executed and produced without a hitch in five minutes, but many of them required months. The accompanying sketches - smudged, dog-eared little works of art in their own right - show just how much planning and forethought went into each of them.

Perhaps the last thing you expect anyone to make a sculpture of is a brush stroke. After all, brush strokes are the two-dimensional building blocks of sculpture's very antithesis, painting - aren't they?

Well, as anyone who enjoys Van Gogh or Rembrandt will tell you, your typical brush stroke is actually a tiny three-dimensional relief object stuck to a canvas. Accordingly, Lichtenstein offers an entire series of "Brush Stroke" sculptures, primary-colored daubs blown up to several thousand times their original size and given depth and texture in the person of wood and metal and, yes, paint.

Perhaps the least satisfying piece in the exhibit is the one that takes up the most space: the Pop Art Car designed by Lichtenstein for actual racing In the Le Mars Grand Prix in 1977. (It came in ninth overall, first in its class.)

In the midst of objects whose meaning is lovingly veiled under several layers of irony, it's a letdown to find something that's exactly what it purports to be - a racing car with all kinds of brightly colored stuff on it. You wait for a punch line, or an insight, that's simply not there.

The car does, however, work as a testimony to Lichtenstein's complete sincerity. You look at "House II," the big and dizzyingly deep cartoon-style domicile he made for the Vienna Biennale shortly before his death, or at any of the "Explosion" or "Lamp" sculptures, and any temptation you feel to view them as negative critiques of America's love of safety and blandness is disappointed.

Lichtenstein, who was happy to see unruffled serenity in our refusal to live in the past or outside our carefully financed designs for living, leaves all the judgment to us.

("Roy Lichtenstein: Sculpture and Drawings" is on view through Sept. 30 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, New York Ave. and 17th Street, Washington, D.C. Admission is $6 for adults, $3 for students and seniors, $10 for family groups. The gallery is closed on Tuesdays. Call 202-639-1700 for more information.)

Roger Anderson is arts and entertainment editor at Scripps Howard News Service.

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