American artist Roy Lichten City on October 27, 1923, an Upper West Side. In the 196 leading figure of the new Pop advertisements and comic st graphic works parodied Am the art world itself. He died i ber 29, 1997.
nstein was born in New York nd grew up on Manhattan’s 60s, Lichtenstein became a p Art movement. Inspired by trips, Lichtenstein’s bright, merican popular culture and in New York City on Septem-
Roy Lichtenstein “What Lichtenstein makes perfectly clear is that all his subjects are made as one before he touches them,” Richard Hamilton wrote in 1968. “Parthenon, Picasso or Polynesian maiden are reduced to the sallje kind of cliche by the syntax of print: reproducing a Lichtenstein is like throwing a fish back into water.” here two artists so crucial to the development of Pop art share the resource of popular culture, of course, but in his brief essay on his peer, Hamilton points to two other affinities as well: like Hamilton, Lichtenstein is concerned less with the object in the world than “with the style of its intermediary treatment,” and “the image is always treated as a totality.” Here again we confront the seeming paradox of a double commitment to the
The First Pop Age – Roy Lichtenstein – 5
mediated nature of the mass image and to the immediate unity of the traditional painting. For Lichtenstein, too, to use the mass image to test the tableau was the best way to advance his art-in this respect his painting is also in line with the painting of modern life-and, as Hamilton suggests, the cliche was his primary means of doing so. The story is now well known. In the late 1950s, Lichtenstein tried our various expressionistic and abstract idioms, with only a hint of popular imagery, such as a smudgy head of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, or Bugs Bunny, in some drawings toward the end of this period (fig. 2.1). In fall 1960, he began to teach at Douglass College of Rutgers University in New Jersey, not far from New York, and in this new context, which included colleagues like Allan Kaprow and Robert WattS, who were involved (or were about to be) with the use of everyday objects in Happenings and in Fluxus activities, his way of working changed.3 In spring 1961, Lichtenstein started to paint pictures based on cartoons and advertisements taken from tabloid newspapers and similar sources-familiar characters like Mickey and Popeye, generic products
like tennis shoes and golf balls, and, a little later, domestic appliances like washing machines and refrigerators all in the clean and cool manner soon to be associated (largely through his example) with Pop an at large. In February 1962, when Lichtenstein first showed these paintings at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, he was charged with “banality”-no term was more pronounced in the initial reception of his work or of Pop in general and when Lichtenstein focused on paintings based on melodramatic comic strips of war and romance, this condemnation grew only more shrill. Not only did his impersonal surfaces appear to reject the subjective depths of Abstract Expressionism, but his superficial subject matter also seemed to ridicule the very profundity of art, its ethical import as well as its cultural importance, and mainstream critics, who had come around to Jackson Pollock and company, were not pleased by this turn of events. In 1949, Life had showcased Pollock under the banner “Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?”; in 1964, the same magazine profiled Lichtenstein under the heading “Is He the Worst Artist in the
fig. 4.0 In the car 1963, Magna on canvas, 68 x 80 in.
The First Pop Age – Roy Lichtenstein – 7
U.S.?” The question was not entirely tongue-in-cheek: many supporters of contemporary art were upset to see cartoon characters and everyday products in the metaphysical spaces recently reserved for the numinous rectangles of Mark Rothko and the epiphanic zips of Barnett Newman. The charge of banality directed at Lichtenstein concentrated initially on his Pop subject matter. It was long accepted that modern artists had poached on popular culture (at least since Courbet, even well before), but they had done so, it was thought, mostly to reinvigorate the staid forms of high painting with the feisty contents of low images-that is, in a manner redemptive of the low, which could be justified, and admired. With Lichtenstein, on the other hand, the low content appeared to overrun the high form , despite his repeated insistence that he was a “classical” artist with “traditional” concerns, one who wanted only to adapt his popular sources to the parameters of fine art (this is another key purpose held in common with Hamilton).7 And as we will see, Lichtenstein did not put his
vulgar materials to very contrarian purposes, at least not in formal terms. Critics soon targeted his Pop procedure, too, which appeared, if anything, worse than banal. Since Lichtenstein appeared to reproduce his cartoons, ads, and comics directly-in fact they were always modified, sometimes extensively-he was thought to lack originality altogether, and in one often-cited instance, he was accused outright of copyright infringement. In 1962, Lichtenstein modeled a few paintings on diagrams of portraits by Cezanne made by an art historian named Erie Loran in 1943 (fig. 2.2) a year later, Loran surfaced to protest loudly in simultaneous articles in the an pressl Lichtenstein did copy, it is true, but in a complicated fashion. Typically in the case of the comics, he would select one or more panels from a strip, sketch one or more motifs from these panels, then project his drawing (never the comic) on a canvas with an opaque projector, trace the image in pencil with alterations along the way (usually involving a further suppressing of details and flattening of
fig. 4.1
Fig. 0.2
M-Maybe
Expulsion from the
1965. Oil and Magna
Garden of Eden
on canvas
1424. Fresco.
60 x 60 in.
figures) , and then fill in his stenciled dots, primary colors, assorted words (often based on the speech bubbles and onomatopoeic exclamations in the comics), and thick contours-the lighter ground of the dots first, the heavier black of the outlines last. The paintings based on ads were produced in similar fashion (figs. 2.3, 2.4.)9 Thus, while a Lichtenstein painting might appear industrially fabricated, it is actually a layering of mechanical reproduction comic, handwork drawing ,
fig. 4.3 I don’t care! I’d rather sink 1965. Oil and Magna on canvas, 60 x 60 in.
mechanical reproduction again projector, and handwork again (tracing, masking, painting), to the point that distinctions between the manual and the mechanical are very difficult to recover. This confounding of the handmade and the readymade, the painterly and the photographic, is effected by most Pop artists, but it is especially thorough in Lichtenstein.10 Where, for example, are we to locate his stenciled dots on the manualmechanical continuum? As is well known, they evoke the so-called Benday dots devised by Benjamin Day in 1879 as a technique to reproduce an image through gradations of shading translated into a system of marks. Yet even as they conjure up this mechanical process of halftone printing, the Lichtenstein dots are always painted; they rhus crystallize the Pop paradox of “the handmade readymade.” 11 By the early 1960s, the Benday technique was already old-fashioned; it appears in Lichtenstein, then, as a cliche in its own right, and at this remove, it is more than his signature device- it typifies the characteristic operation of his work.
fig. 4.4 Whaam! I pressed the fire control 1965. Oil on canvas Newcastle, 1955