The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 52

6 Part Mov. 3, 1969 00flRfftIf0Dme Exhibits on American Life at Metropolitan Museum of Art ROB 'S BY WILLIAM WILSON Timtt itiW Writtr BRINGS YOU ONE OF THE RICHEST PLEASURES IN ALL OF EUROPE jAFour major New York museums are showing contemporary art about C'the quality of American hiUfe, The controversial three-decade, 35 -gallery compendium at the Metro-l; politan Museum of Art is dominated by abstraction. You have to read meta-pphor3 to translate its art-fcior-art's-sake language in-K'to. statements about the culture, but its very presence in the traditional institution amply demon-j strates a general national P4ssion for coptempor-C aneity. More Literal Three other large exhi- bitions are more literal in their transcription of our current love affair with ourselves.

Major retrospectives of Pop artists Claes Oldenberg and Roy Lichtenstein are giving New Yorkers a broad look 'at two of the funniest and ft mpst trenchant social cri-f tics of our times. "Human Concern Personal Tor-rnent" at the Whitney Museum of American Art -a collection of scathing f. social damnation and agonized individual haunts, Most great satirists harbor a deep love for their targets. They are too smart not to recognize that they, themselves, are very much part of the Khuman comedy. Claes Oldenberg, sur zones from stitched-together cloth and vinyl.

He' has created whole "environments," like a storeful of plaster food or a bedroom cf rhomboidal kitsch furniture. Looking like a clean-shaven underfed Santa Claus, he works incessantly, sketching, writing poetry, proposing American "monuments" like an SO-foot teddy bear for' Central Park. He is credited with having sired the earthworks movement when he made a negative sculpture by digging a hole and filling it back up again. Oldenberg's unpeopled America is that of Jackie Gleason and huge, softhearted truck drivers. He views the nation as a place of incessant activity pitched towards gaining, hard, material objects that are then regarded with the tenderness we usually reserve for infants.

We come out as a Paul Bunyan who has learned to substitute telephone conversations, ice cream, and coloring book delicacies for human intimacy. Out of Survey Oldenberg comes out of his survey with a kind of Rabelaisian stature. Historically, art is a refigura-tion of Abstract Expressionism. The exhibition also hints to the heretofore ignored influence of French proto-pop artist Jean Dubuffet. I hope when the flag waving has died down Dubuffet's importance will be fully recognized.

If Oldenberg's humor is like a flood of osterized bananas, that of Roy Lichtenstein is laser -sharp. Natty, sharp- featured, soft-eyed, the 46-year-old artist compares nicely to Alexander Pope, Oscar Wilde or Aubrey Beard-sley beneath his comic-strip facade. A full survey at the Guggenheim Museum ranges from his once controversial comic panels through diagrams, "Moderne" paintings and sculpture based on a 30s movie palace decor, to comic-style renderings of Expressionist brush strokes, Picassos, the Parthenon and, more recently, brilliant Ben Day re-creations of Monet's serial cathedral images. Lichtenstein's humor is. perverse, double reverse sophistication based on mann erist archness.

Frankly it gets a little cute. The thing that promotes him to a considerable talent are his abilities as a painter's painter and an intellectual's wit. Elevate Artists Both exhibitions seem to elevate the artists, newcomers less than a decade ago, to Old Master stature. It is perhaps an encouraging sign that the American aesthetic may be leveling off to a point of allowing artists time to- mellow instead of demanding the kind of incessant creative flip-flops that made nervous wrecks of some of the Neo-Dadaists. Lichtenstein and Oldenberg are appropriate candidates for Pop-Laureates since they, finally, are quite traditional artists.

"Human Concern Personal Torment" at the Whitney is generally regarded something of a flop as an exhibition. Granted that, it still is one of those flops that is finally refreshing after the stagnating rehashes of Top Ten hits. It is a mixed-up show of figurative art about violence. Some of it is violent social criticism that ranges from Thomas Nast's 1874 cartoon caricaturing police as pigs, through virulent social-critical contemporary cartoonists like Spain, Robert Crumb, Jim Nutt and the related, underrated painter Peter Saul. veyed in more tnan iou "pbjects in a stifingly L'Trnwdprt installation at.

t.h Museum of Modern Art, is almost Chaucerian in the breadth of his humor and compassion. The 40-year-i old, Stockholm-born artist finds the American landscape "lovable and dumb." jj- 111 eight years he's attained the stature of an t.old master making "soft," foyersize sculpture of phones, lavatories, type-iTtfriters and even maps of the Manhattan postal I ili I I A x3h-jrjrfi AA 5: A-A a -J fe; Chocolatier deBelgique 1 1 1 1 i ft 1 1 VENTURA: STRIPES ON THE MOVE LUGGAGE WITH A STYLE ALL ITS OWNi DESIGNED WITH A WOMAN'S FASHION CONSCIOUSNESS IN MIND, THESE PIECES OF LUGGAGE ARE STURDY AND PRACTICAL, AS WELL AS HANDSOME OUTSIDE, A 'RICHLY GRAINED VINYL WITH COLOR-KEYED stripes; INSIDE, A LINING OF ELEGANT MOIRE FABRIC, SHOWN: DELUXE GARMENT CARRIER, 140.00; .24" PULLMAN, AT 5750. OTHER PIECES FROM 35.00. BLUE, GOLDEN MELON, AVOCADO OR FASHION BLACK, FROM OUR LUGGAGE, ALL STORES, ROBINSON'S THE CHOCOLATE YOU MIGHT HAVE DISCOVERED IN PARIS OR BRUSSELS IS HERS IN ALL ITS ELEGANCE. RICH, DELICIOUS, PURE CHOCOLATE, SO IRRESISTIBLE, AND OURS ALONE IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, FASHIONED INTO TRUFFLES, OAK LEAVES, CHESTNUTS, YIELDING HIDDEN SIPS OF CHAMPAGNE, TOUCHES OF COGNAC, DOLLOPS OF NUT PATE.

EACH DELECTABLE PIECE IS MORE SUPERB THAN THE ONE BEFORE. AND THE BOXES THAT HOLD THIS PURE CHOCOLATE ARE WORKS. OF ART IN THEMSELVES, WITH VELVETS, ROSES, PHEASANT FEATHERS, WILD THINGS, COME, FEAST YOUR EYES. THEN FEAST. IN OUR CANDY, SHOP TONIGHT ALL NINE STORES COS ANGELES BEVERLY HILLS PASADENA 10iOO 9i00 9:30 9:00 MA 8-0333 OR LOS ANGELES TOLL-FREE NUMBERi CR 3-4850 panorama city 10:00 9)00 AT 0-5171 246-6541 ANAHEIM 10:03 9i30 OS 5-3344 EX 3-9271 GLENDALE SANTA BARBARA 10:009:00 10:009:00 37-5500 714776-2000 805637-6411 NEWPORT 10:009:30 714644-2800 SAN DIEGO 10:009:00 714291-5800.