10*20*30*40.

November 1962

Forty years ago the nascent phenomenon of Pop art was making its bid to challenge the primacy of Abstract Expressionism. Contributing editor THOMAS CROW revisits John Coplans's "The New Painting of Common Objects," the then associate editor's assessment of Walter Hopps's exhibition by the same name.

THE YOUNG WALTER HOPPS was only a year or so into his tenure as director of the Pasadena Art Museum when he mounted a show with a strong claim to be the first museum exhibition devoted to the emergent phenomenon of Pop art. Not that he ever wanted to call it that: Joe Goode remembers how assiduously Hopps searched to avoid a term he associated with the ambitious English theorizing of Richard Hamilton and Lawrence Alloway--one that gave pride of place to mass-produced consumer goods over the unique object of art. Goode, for his part, insists that he would have refused to lend his two contributions to the exhibition had Hopps not come up with an acceptable alternative: "The New Painting of Common Objects." *

For Artforum, the happy result of Hopps's terminological nicety was the first cover that truly set the magazine apart: Goode's untitled juxtaposition of monochrome canvas with a hand-painted milk bottle centrally placed on a shallow shelf at the painting's base, the bottle's outline etched into the faint geometry of its magenta backdrop. The red of the logo picks up the discordant crimson that Goode applied to his chosen common object. For its sixth issue, the editors had hit upon a cover that joined their distinctive square format with an image of comparable freshness and strength of form.

In those early days, the more extended essays in the magazine tended toward the tentative and short-winded, the first steps, it seemed, in taking the measure of an art world seen from an unaccustomed West Coast vantage point. Associate editor John Coplans's piece on "The New Painting of Common Objects" took the magazine's ambitions a long step forward, at a stroke pulling Artforum into line with Los Angeles developments fostered by Hopps, Ed Kienholz, and Irving Blum at the Ferus Gallery, to be joined by new players like Virginia Dwan and Nicholas Wilder. Southern California had become the incubator of the Pop phenomenon, however leery Hopps and Goode may have been of the label, and Artforum had caught on.

At the start of his essay, Coplans aims for the correct LA tone by introducing the artists as if they were pro wrestlers or drag racers: "OUT OF NEW YORK... OUT OF DETROIT ... OUT OF OKLAHOMA CITY...." (Though half the artists were based in Los Angeles, none are listed as being "out of" the city itself.) Detroit native Philip Hefferton had personally set this tone at the exhibition opening: Walking up to Sam Francis, he declared, "Hefferton's the name, common objects my game. Time and space died yesterday." Coplans appended to Oklahoman Ed Ruscha's introduction a heroic epithet that expressed the same sentiment: "An ugly point was reached when an enraged faculty member burned a work of Ruscha, when hung on the [Chouinard] Institute walls."

Both statements imagined with pleasure the eclipse of Abstract Expressionism, whose prestige among older West Coast artists (like the Chouinard faculty) constituted a sure-fire recipe for unending provincial status--and had driven Goode, for one, to employment as a janitor in his old school at the time of the exhibition. Following his flamboyant introductions, Coplans aids the cause by consigning the New York School and its epigones to an indecipherable, dead-end "modernism of metaphysics." Then, abandoning the demotic tone altogether, he reaches for an equally high-flown socioeconomic theory to sustain the claims of the new wave: "Man, having engineered a society to an undreamed of state of mass production, now labors solely in order to consume with the same ferocity as he produces [plus ca change]... This new art of Common Objects springs from the lashback of these visual effects and has nothing to do with any form of descriptive realism."

Capsule paragraphs devoted to each artist follow (including Roy Lichtenstein as the principal exhibit for his theory), after which effort Coplans attempts no conclusion at all. In its place comes a fascinating, if idiosyncratic, time line documenting "The Common Object and Art." The first entry, dated 1890, is devoted to one "Eugene Ajet": It's a mark of the moment that it was still possible for a well-informed writer to misspell the name. Then it veers through an itinerary one could study with profit today, joining as it does the great hotrod pinstriper Von Dutch Holland with Stieglitz, Cornell, Schwitters, and Enrico Baj, to name a few of the many names packed into half a page.

It's tonic to reach back to a defamiliarized time when everyone was learning on the fly and unashamed of that fact. It was surely the last time Warhol--the most public artist of modern times--could be described as working "in almost total seclusion." And the brashly humorous Hefferton, along with his Detroit compatriot Robert Dowd, appears to have dropped out of sight altogether. Goode's cover remains, with Coplans's rhapsodic description of his contribution ("the two loneliest paintings imaginable"), as a token of the moment before one knew for sure what Pop was. Do we now?

* I am grateful to Walter Hopps and joe Goode for their generous conversations about "The New Painting of common Objects."

In this ongoing series, Artforum looks back on an essay of note from our pages ten, twenty thirty, or forty years ago to the month. Visit artforum.com to view the contents of all four issues and read selected articles from each.