Rosenquist & Lichtenstein Are Alive

When the two pop artists first strode out upon the New York City art scene with their motley amalgams of commercial layouts, graphic devices and gigantic blowups, Rosenquist and Lichtenstein seemed as hard to tell apart as Hamlet's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

Since then, pop art has faded as a fad, but the two artists are far from dead; instead, each has emerged with a distinctive style, a commanding personality and a loyal following of his own.

Roy Lichtenstein, 44, the Leonardo of the funnies, has attracted 20,000 people in his first ten days at London's august Tate Gallery, where he is the first living American to be given a full-dress retrospective. Critics rhapsodized over his Ben Day dots and thought balloons, his deadpan spoofs of modern art, his tear-stained blondes and stone-faced Steve Canyon heroes. Said the London Observer: "The calmest crystallizer of our generation, a kind of Ingres from Manhattan."

James Albert Rosenquist, 34, the Rubens of the billboards, is doing equally well on this side of the Atlantic. The sometime sign painter from Grand Forks, N. Dak., stars this month with 32 works at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa (see color opposite). Gifted with pop art's most facile brush, Rosenquist was a smash with his first Manhattan show in 1962. His huge, bold panoramas combine the photo-simulated faces, glossily glamorized foods and chrome-plated gadgetry of Madison Avenue in weird compositions where objects seem to float off the canvas. In their own way, they are also a wry celebration of the way Americans view their kandy-kolored environment.

The artist credits his period as a billboard painter, following his departure from the University of Minnesota, with pointing him toward both the idiom and the mystique of the open road. He uses cars, planes and the notion of motion generally to convey what he considers basic American traits: devotion to progress and prodigality, record-shattering creativity and waste.

Strip See-Throughs. Lanai deals with the would-be starlets of Hollywood, but the artist builds it around an upside-down Buick to suggest both physical extravagance and social mobility. His metaphor is also central to the F-111, the 85-ft.-long anatomy of the costly, controversial fighter-bomber, which will go on view at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum next month. He used the F111 to symbolize, among other things, his indignation at the Kennedy assassination, which he sees as the supreme example of "horrible extravagance."

Neither Rosenquist nor Lichtenstein has rested by the wayside. Each has explored new avenues of expression, Lichtenstein with a series of nonobjective "modern paintings" and tubular sculptures in the style of the 1930s thai some observers believe heralds the ad vent of a whole new nostalgic school of art. Rosenquist has taken to painting his images onto transparent Mylar, then slicing it into strips to create a new kind of "walk-through sculpture." But he will not abandon brush and can vas. "Oil painting may be old-fashioned," he says, "but I don't think any medium is dead--as long as a person can prove his intuition by using it."

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