Degas and Lichtenstein at the Morgan in N.Y.

The Morgan Library has two fine drawing shows up this season: a small but choice collection of Degas and a major retrospective of Roy Lichtenstein's black-and-white drawings from the 1960s.

The Degas covers the first half of the artist's career, c. 1855-85. A couple of early self-portraits withhold more than they reveal, showing a long-faced young man with a very Gallic nose and a composed expression, and an imposing bourgeois couple very much in the style of Ingres (Degas' teacher had been the latter's pupil).

There was no style or technique of drawing of which Degas was not the master, from the severest graphite outline to the richest effects of oil on paper. His Study of a Seated Woman (1868-69) uses oil over graphite with broad areas of wash to present a distantly observed yet erotically charged image of a working-class woman, her left shoulder bared, with a single stroke boldly evoking the vagus of her left ear to add a fillip to the whole.

But the show soon gets down to Degas' reigning obsession— motion— and his two favorite venues for observing it: the dance hall and the race track. The quiver of tensed muscles— not, as in Goya, for the disciplined work of the laborer (or the torturer), but for giving pleasure to the unseen spectator— is his truest subject, and the one that relates us back most intimately to the almost Byzantine stillness of those early self-portraits. It's the art of a great and punitively fastidious voyeur.

Breakout generation

Roy Lichtenstein was one of a generation of American artists— including Larry Rivers, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenberg and Jasper Johns— who came of age in an era dominated by Abstract Expressionism, and wanted to break out of a style dominated by heroic precursors. Their collective rebellion goes, generically but somewhat inaccurately, by the name of Pop Art.

Whereas the Expressionists wanted to dig deep, Pop artists returned to the surface, taking the ready-made images of commercial advertising and, in Lichtenstein's case, the comic strip, to produce a new formalism. Precisely because these images were so familiar and so stereotyped, they lent themselves to a deadpan satire that was both a comment on the pretensions of fine art and the commodified landscape of the postwar American dream. Think of Lenny Bruce turning into Jack Paar.

Speaking through cartoons

Lichtenstein's intentions were always formal. "The cartoon," he said, "seems to have everything I need to make a modern drawing." He worked directly from strips such as "All-American Men of War" and "Girls' Romances," incorporating as a decorative element the Benday dots that were a part of the cruder printing processes of earlier strips.

At first, he set out to make replicas, but then became freer in arranging and transposing the originals. A cool, highly objectified style emerged that owed much to a backward glance at Matisse.

The joke was on the maudlin sentiment of the strips themselves, and their naÓ¯ve reflections of American commodity fetishism, soap opera romance, and shoot-'em-up militarism. If social criticism were implied, however, it was wrapped in layers of irony. It was as if to say that American society was so self-parodying that no comment was required.

Food and drink

Lichtenstein worked this style in primary-color paintings and colored etchings. The 50 large black-and-white drawings made through the 1960s, however, were a case apart. At a distance of 40-plus years, they have acquired a monumental quality— classic while still hip, a permutation of base materials into something like gold.

This often turns up in Lichtenstein's depiction of food and drink, for example in Hot Dog, in his two versions of Baked Potato (a strategic splash of yellow here), Bread and Jam, and Cup of Coffee, where simplified forms distill the essence of the mass-produced. There's a sly eroticism, too, in Foot Medication and Keds, with their implied fetishism, and the split-banana form of Zipper.

"The passionless style," Lichtenstein said, "is my passion"— a statement that applied, perhaps, to his painstaking technique, but hardly to at least some of the impulses behind it.

Paraphrasing postcards

As the decade wore on, Lichtenstein freed himself from his original models and went on to paraphrase photographs and postcards, as in Landscape and Temple of Apollo (Corinth). Like Francis Bacon, he produced a sense of the real through immersion in the second-hand.

At the same time, a very classicizing abstraction, derived in part from Barnett Newman, lay behind Lichtenstein's work. It is this that emerges more forcefully now, and gives these works their special place in the 20th-Century American pantheon. They're no longer topical now, not even very importantly historical, but they possess the grace of a timeless formality.♦


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