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ROY LICHTENSTEIN

ROY LICHTENSTEIN

''no comment'' ROY LICHTENSTEIN

The artist's vast imagination, who produces his works with the aim of maximizing the visual impact by developing comic book techniques with the traditions of painting and bringing a new perspective and composition to the graphic image, is the aspect that inspires us the most in 10AM sweatshirts and t-shirts.

He replies "no comment" for various jobs as a polite way of expressing his dissatisfaction.
"There's clearly something wrong with me."

In 1960, Lichtenstein was appointed as an assistant professor in New Jersey. During this period, he met names such as Allan Kaprow, George Segal, Robert Watts, Claes Oldenburg; and expanded his field of vision. He was present at a few Happenings but did not actively participate. All of these supported his imagination; but the real striking point was when one of his sons showed him a Mickey Mouse book and said, "I bet you can't draw that well." In 1961, Roy Lichtenstein made six drawings showing types from comic book frames; he only changed their colors and forms from the original source. It was during this period that he began to use the Benday dots, calligraphy and speech bubbles that would eventually become his signature in his paintings.

Lichtenstein came to national prominence, or rather infamy, when Life magazine published a 1964 article about him, asking, "Is he America's most boring artist?" Because of his references to contemporary culture and its mechanical aspect, his work was generally interpreted as a critique of modern industrial society. But Lichtenstein was hesitant to interpret his own art in these terms. "We like to think of industrialism as something despicable," he said in an interview in the 1960s. "I don't really know what to say about it. There's something incredibly fragile about it. I suppose I'd still rather be sitting under a tree with a picnic basket than under a gas pump, but signs and comics are interesting subjects. There's certainly something useful and powerful and vital about commercial art." Pop-art artists "use these things, but we don't support stupidity, international adolescence and terrorism."

The success of these modern masterpieces is based on Lichtenstein’s ability to focus on the pivotal moment in his source material, which he calls the “pregnant moment,” and to manipulate it to maximize visual impact by developing comic book techniques with the traditions of painting and by giving the graphic image a new perspective and composition. In his poignant work, The Drowning Girl (1963), a much larger cartoon image zoomed in and cropped to a square, a swirl of waves covers a woman’s face.

No one really invented Pop Art, since brightly colored advertisements, consumer products, and pulp fiction were all readily available. But when Roy Lichtenstein began copying images of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse from a children’s book, he not only discovered a style that would define much of 1960s American art, but he also inextricably linked himself to an invention he didn’t invent.

Lichtenstein’s use of red dots for skin tones and blues for the sea or sky, achieved by spraying paint through a perforated surface, meant that he had removed the artist’s touch at least two years before Andy Warhol’s characteristically carefree proposition of 1963. ‘Paintings are very difficult. I’d like to be a machine, wouldn’t you?’ Lichtenstein began with repetition early on, such as the image of a hand buttering a slice of bread or putting on a wedding ring, but his truly groundbreaking works were those he enlarged from scenes taken from adventure or romance comics, and it is pleasing to see so many of these together in this retrospective.

What is so wonderful about this irony is that Lichtenstein’s carefully constructed and executed reconstruction of the explosively violent brushstroke appears to be much more explosively violent than the real thing. This is ironic, but not paradoxical. The explosiveness of this image comes from the black outline and the sharp outlines of the shapes. But as for the sharpness, I personally think that this violence comes from a metaphor that I have always seen in shapes such as teeth or jagged cutting tools. I asked Lichtenstein if he had put these shapes there deliberately. He said he had not. ‘I noticed that the edges of some of the brushstrokes looked like explosions, but I really had no other image in mind than what was visible.’ Here we see that he was, unlike ever, extremely determined about what the pictures meant to him. But for me, it turns out that he was completely uninterested in one of the most impressive features of his most impressive paintings.

In his series of brushstrokes, as in his comic book images of love and peace, Lichtenstein deals with the subject matter of his paintings in a highly emotional way, with what he calls the 'extremely distant' approach of commercial art. 'I don't really use that method, but it looks as if I used it and it was done by a committee.'

Lichtenstein’s method of making is the exact opposite of Jasper John, whose ironic use of common emblems inspired him and other creators of Pop art. When Johns painted cool subjects, he gave them a spirit or something resembling a spirit. When Lichtenstein painted soulful subjects, he gave them an air or something resembling an air. In an oft-quoted interview in 1963, he claimed that he wanted to make art that was so “low” that no one would want to hang it. At the time, he probably had no idea that collectors would one day pay millions of dollars to hang his work on the wall. But it was never easy to judge how seriously to take Lichtenstein, and after his work was unveiled at the Castelli, it soon became clear that his interests extended far beyond transforming the culture of Mickey Mouse and Bazooka bubble gum into a groundbreaking new art movement. In fact, by the late 1960s, he had stopped using comics as a source. In the same simple spirit, both playful and laboring, he produced paintings that imitated Picasso and Cezanne. Lichtenstein calculated exactly how many black triangles were needed to make an engagement ring sparkle. He represented the indentations on a golf ball by a calendar of dark moons that waxed and waned in indivisible degrees to describe the curves of the ball. The precise permutations of the dots perfectly evoke the transparency of a magnifying glass. These images are so impressive that they transcend the subjects they represent, and these subjects become less the objects they represent than the commercial representation itself. But in Lichtenstein's work they both amount to the same thing. He was always thinking about the great dilemma of painting: how to represent in the two dimensions of the flat canvas what can be seen or experienced in the three-dimensional world.

But Lichtenstein does not merely reflect the world. The pleasure felt in the foot-pedaled trash can that opens and closes with the touch of a big toe (referred to by the diptych's hinge) is reflected as a rainbow, which he cannot help but insert into a late Cézanne pastiche. The girls, drowned in tears and suffering from unrequited love, are touching despite all their energy, and become strange nude figures of advanced age.

Lichenstein, who came to fame and fortune in the early 1960s, continued to experiment with new forms and subjects, acquiring qualities that many would not associate with him. The Seashore, a landscape painted partly on Plexiglas, has an oddly serene quality, and the sculptures have an elegant beauty.

But ultimately he always seems to have avoided the brush. What he did best was what first inspired him in the worlds of comics and newspaper ads: simplified imagery, block colours and half-tone dots. He was as strong in three dimensions as he was in two. This exhibition includes examples of his ceramic and brass sculptures that suggest what he could do if he experimented with other media instead of focusing solely on painting.

Lichtenstein was completely clear about his intentions, purely on a formal level. He knew what he could bring to the comics' images that they lacked. "There is a sense of order that is missing. There is a kind of order among them, a kind of composition, but it is a learned composition. This composition aims to be more open, to be read, to communicate, rather than to unify the elements that are included. In other words, the normal aesthetic sensibility is something that is often missing, and I think many people think that this is also missing in my work. But it is a quality that I want to acquire."

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