No artists were some-more critical than a New York School of Abstract Expressionists. Even a word “school” carries with it something unbending and formal. Pop art, by approach of contrast, was anything though solemn. If it could even be labeled a school, it would be of a accumulation for delinquents.

“Pop! Goes a Humor,” a new muster during a Palm Springs Art Museum (through Oct. 7), gleefully illustrates a thesis of artists who don’t take themselves too seriously. Originating in Britain in a 1950s, Pop unequivocally flourished in a U.S. in a following decade. To decider by this show, during least, Pop artists were reduction endangered with amicable or domestic joke than with poking fun during one another or severe a hierarchies of a art world.

Red Grooms, for example, is represented by a integrate of playfully derisive lithographs. One is a mimic of a Cedar Bar, a famous New York School watering hole where Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and their brethren are displayed celebration and smoking and generally looking some-more like a garland of unhappy barflies than philosopher-artists of complicated angst.

The other Grooms work is a three-dimensional cut-out (something like a child’s pop-up book) of Picasso and his studio. In a forehead stands a shirtless Picasso, subsequent to one of his heading owls; a credentials is a inclusive arrangement of paintings. It’s a dainty depiction of a artist surrounded by his possess dainty creations.

The show, drawn from a museum’s permanent collection, ranges from Jim Dime’s reverently hand-painted etchings of paltry implements (a spoon, pliers) to Andy Warhol’s neon-coloring of Chairman Mao.

Like a Abstract Expressionists who came adult with signature styles — either it was a zip portrayal or a single, vast brush cadence — Pop artists generally essay for an individualized, tangible motif. In David Gilhooly’s box it’s frogs. His sculptures recast iconicimages — such as a meditating Buddha or a drastic Prince Arthur — with immature amphibians in a starring role.

But even in this category there’s a clown. That would be Robert Arneson, whose self-portraits pleasure in his possess bald, flabby, bearded face, one close-up of that shows him picking his nose. Even when Arneson veers divided from his favorite theme he can’t assistance branch art-historical conventions on their head. What could be reduction superb than a sacred Greek vase? Arneson’s sculpture, “Rat Krater,” advise an answer: a celebration play with a vast rodent scurrying about.

— Michael J. Ybarra