'High and Low': modern art meets popular culture. (various artists; Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; 20th century popular arts)

'High and Low': modern art meets popular culture Latrine duty is dirty work, but in the army somebody has to do it. The buck private, howeveR, was determined it would be someone else. He had talents for higher things, things the Army could use: he could draw. Finally he got a chance to submit his portfolio. The officer who saw it, and who also did his own drawing in civilian life, got him transferred to a section that made posters and signs.

It was 1947 and the private was Roy Lichtenstein, who was to become famous as the artist who turned images derived from action comic books into Pop Art paintings. Mustered out into the art world, he was to far outrank the officer, a man named Irv Novick, who would help create those very same comics.

The story is a neat summary of the complicated relationships--and shifting rankings--between the "high" arts and the "low," as documented in the Museum of Modern Art's new show "High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture," on view in New York from October 7 through January 15, 1991. The show, sponsored by AT&T, will travel to the Art Institute of Chicago and to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

In "High and Low," MOMA--the very bastion of high modernism--pauses to look at the importance of low, or popular, arts in the creation of the art regularly to be seen on its walls. It focuses on the influence of four vital low arts: caricature, comics, graffiti and advertising. One of the most ambitious shows in the museum's history, it assembles a dizzying variety of items--mail-order catalogs, newspapers, photographs of store windows, advertisements--in addition to paintings, sculpture and drawings.

The show's witty catalog is an essential adjunct to the assembled work and vital to an understanding of the curators' implicit argument. In addition to mapping sometimes familiar low-art influences on major modernist artists, the show and catalog are studded with wonderful conections and bits of history. Together they track the Benday dots featured in Pop Art back through the comics to their invention in the latter part of the 19th century by printer Benjamin Day, and compare them with the Pointillism of Seurat. They include early images of Bibendum--the Michelin Man (see cover)--and tell the story of his birth in a surrealistic encounter of one of the Michelin brothers with a pile of tires (SMITHSONIAN, June 1986). They watch the transformations of Mickey Mouse in art, from Roy Lichtenstein to Claes Oldenburg, and explore the relationships between George Herriman's Krazy Kat and the work of such artists as Joan Miro and Philip Guston. Chester Gould's Dick Tracy is reborn in Dick Tracy by Andy Warhol. Jasper John's Ballantine ale cans of 1960, memorialized with all the solemnity of bronzed baby shoes, are played off against a Ballantine ale advertisement dating from the artist's childhood. And Roy Lichtenstein paintings are displayed near panels of "Star Jockey," from the All-American Men of War comic-book series, drawn in part by Irv Novick.

"High and Low" will also be one of the most controversial and talked-about shows in years at MOMA, an institution frequently criticized of late for simply recelebrating its modernist heroes, from Picasso to Warhol. Any exhibition that puts the Zap comics of R. Crumb on the walls of the Museum of Modern Art is bound to get people talking.

Sorting out high and low art and their mutual influences is a tough job, but somebody had to do it--somebody should have done it long ago. The man who took on the job and who did it carefully, thoroughly, and with a consummate sense of the politics of the museum and the art world, was Kirk Varnedoe, director of MOMA's Department of Painting and Sculpture. He believes the relationship…