Roy Lichtenstein

1923-1997

Author of some of the most recognisable Pop Art works ever made, Roy Lichtenstein is known for bringing the world of advertising and comic books into fine art. Born in New York in 1923, he trained as a painter at the Art Students League before being drafted in the army during World War II. His first Pop Art works made to resemble cheaply printed comic strips were produced in the early 1960s and shocked viewers and critics alike. His trademark use of Ben Day dot shading returned in his series of ‘Haystacks’, which replicate Monet’s landscapes challenging perceived distinctions between ‘low’ and ‘high’ art. In the following decades, he engaged with various artistic aesthetics such as Cubism and Surrealism, constantly exploring new possibilities of formal dialogues. Lichtenstein’s fame did not subside after his passing in 1997. His work, subject of numerous recent exhibitions, continues to be relevant and intellectually stimulating.

Paintings such as ‘Whaam!’ and ‘Drowning Girl’ (1963) are perhaps the most recognisable works of Roy Lichtenstein, the American artist who brought the world of advertising and comic books into the domain of fine art. Among the key features of Lichtenstein’s art are his focus on everyday objects, his choice of bright, bold colours and his use of Ben Day dots, a printing technique in which small dots are placed strategically to produce shading and secondary colours.

Born in New York in 1923, Lichtenstein studied painting at the Art Students League of New York. He had an opportunity to become acquainted with European old masters and contemporary artists such as Rembrandt, Daumier and Picasso during his station in France, where he served during World War II.

Lichtenstein’s controversial works attempted to redefine the premises of Pop Art through parodies, visual quotations and the appropriation of images deemed unsuitable for ‘proper’ art. His rise to fame came in the 1960s, when he started producing paintings such as ‘Look Mickey’ (1961) and ‘Crying Girl’ (1963). With their flat stretches of primary colours, voice bubbles and Ben Day dot shading, the resemblance to comic strips these paintings have disconcerted viewers. Using oil pigments to mimic printing techniques, these paintings also constitute satirical jabs at American mass-produced, pre-packaged culture.

The ironic slant of his paintings emerges in his series ‘Haystacks’ (1969), a reinvention of Monet’s Impressionist landscapes in which he questioned more explicitly the separation between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art. In this period he also expanded his artistic practices into sculpture, creating two and three-dimensional mass-produced pieces. By the end of the decade Lichtenstein had acquired a worldwide fame, his name featured among those of leading artists such as Warhol, Jasper Johns and James Rosenquist.

Lichtenstein’s work became more conceptual in the 1970s when he produced the ‘Mirror’ series. These illusionistic paintings, made to look like mirrors but featuring his trademark Ben Day dots and bright colours, imitate the appearance of light and shadow on glass and explore the relationship between perception and reality. In this decade, he engaged with established aesthetics such as Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism and Expressionism. Lichtenstein’s attitude was one of constant artistic exploration in which he variously assembled and fragmented different pictorial elements in search of a productive formal dialogue.

Such intellectual considerations have been one of Lichtenstein’s enduring concerns. After producing large murals and public sculptures commissioned by various American and European states in the 1980s, he created three major pictorial series in the 1990s which delve into these artistic problems. The ‘Interiors’, ‘Nudes’ and ‘Chinese Landscapes’ investigate the ambiguities of vision and reflection, the theme of the female body and the possibilities of representation of material space onto canvas.

Lichtenstein died in 1997 at the age of 73 in New York. Today, his works are held in the collections of important institutions such as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and the Tate Modern in London. The continued relevance of Lichtenstein’s artworks emerges in their constant challenge to binaries of reality and artificiality, of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, of abstraction and figuration, of original and reproduction.

BRUSHSTROKE

Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein produced his series of ‘Brushstroke’ paintings between 1965 and 1966. The theme of this series, as the title suggests, is the gestural expression of painting, which questions the meanings of art objects. While some of these works represent individual brushstrokes, others include the painter’s hand as well as his tools. Painted by hand in primary colours, the brushstrokes are juxtaposed by Lichtenstein’s trademark Ben Day dots, thus explicitly made to appear as mechanical reproductions.

The depersonalised look of these works points not only to the banalities of commercial art seen in advertising and publishing, but also, critics claim, to concurrent artistic aesthetics. The ‘Brushstrokes’ are commonly understood as satirical pieces that ridicule the centrality ascribed to gesture and spontaneity by Abstract Expressionist artists. If, traditionally, brushstrokes were seen as the mark of the individual onto the canvas, Lichtenstein isolated them, disconnecting the image from the artist’s embodied action and at the same time disparaging the established art historical narrative that glorifies the artist’s individual genius.

After 1966, Lichtenstein incorporated his ‘Brushstrokes’ into other works, and from the 1980s onwards, he transformed them into three-dimensional sculptures that have since then been commissioned for private and public spaces. Poking fun at the idea that brushstrokes convey an introspective expression of the artist’s intimate world, these sculptures are resolutely impersonal and self-referential, embodying the artistic philosophy of Pop Art. The spontaneity and immediacy of the gesture is contrasted by the sculptural appearance of these works. Gestures are made into mechanised motions and, reduced to their bare essentials, are transformed into symbols open to the viewer’s interpretation.

INTERIOR

Roy Lichtenstein

Throughout his practice, Roy Lichtenstein explored the intersections of traditional art and mass-media figurations. One of his most iconic series is the ‘Interiors’, produced in the early 1990s, in which he combined modernist perspectives on furniture design with stencil and screenprint technologies. These monumental canvases, based on advertisement and commercial renderings, employ thick lines, flat primary colours and chiaroscuro shading to produce figurations that appear both painterly and mechanical.

The ‘Interiors’ series was inspired by furniture advertisements the artist saw on billboards and in telephone books. These works not only portray the banal, mass-produced environment of the late 20^th century, but also constitute an attempt to investigate the ambiguities of perception when looking at representations of reflective surfaces. Lichtenstein reproduced mirrors, windows and polished tables, interpreting them as illusionistic devices and confounding the viewer’s expectations. As with most of Lichtenstein’s oeuvre, the ‘Interiors’ works offer an element of self-referentiality, expressed in the frequent reproduction of his own artworks framed on the walls.

Through the artist’s visual hyperboles and references to pop culture, ‘Interiors’ is an attempt to reconcile three-dimensional representation with the flat canvas surface. The large scale, almost life-sized composition of these works creates an illusory space, which seems to draw the viewer inside the canvases and into the lifelike environment they depict. Strong, neat perspectives and detailed figurations emphasise the realistic yet surreal quality of these depersonalised, generic spaces. This series, inserting commercial visual styles into the rarefied art world, produces an unsettling effect that confounds and disorients viewers.

COMIC BOOK

Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein is perhaps most well-known for his ‘Comic Book’ paintings, which he produced from 1961-65. In these works, he famously juxtaposed cartoon characters from comic books with abstract backgrounds. Mimicking printed illustrations with thick, black outlines, Ben Day dots of primary colours, extreme foreshortening and speech bubbles, these works are now synonymous with the artist and contributed to the definition of contemporary Pop Art ideologies.

While the concurrent painterly aesthetics emphasised the importance of gesture, interiority and technical purity, Lichtenstein chose to mimic the mechanical techniques of cheap printing. Lichtenstein’s goal was to acknowledge the artistic importance of popular entertainment forms, stating that ‘there are certain things that are usable, forceful, and vital about commercial art’. His choice of comic book illustrations, then considered a childish pastime with no artistic or intellectual value, was also intended as a satirical and playful blend of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, which shocked the critics of the time.

Another subversive element of the ‘Comic Book’ series is the combination of text and image, a nod to Surrealist, Cubist and Dadaist collage works. Lichtenstein’s use of letters ranged from single words to longer sentences, isolated from their context and suggestive of multiple interpretations.

The flat appearance of these paintings, combined with their straightforward content and the mesmerising accumulation of coloured dots, fascinated critics and viewers alike. Since the first exhibition of ‘Comic Book’ paintings in 1962, these images have been reproduced in countless printed editions, furniture, clothing and fashion accessories. Lichtenstein’s references to commercial art and popular culture icons constitute both a celebration and a caricature of American life, questioning assumptions about the social role of visuality.

HAYSTACKS

Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein’s ‘Haystacks’ prints, initiated in 1969, were the first works he conceived as a series. Inspired by his visit to the 1968 exhibition ‘Serial Imagery’, which included Monet’s Impressionist investigations in light and colour, this series demonstrates Lichtenstein’s continued interest in the themes of repetition, cliché and visual appropriation.

Monet’s ‘Haystacks’ (1891) reproduced the same countryside landscape at different times of the day, exploring how interactions of light and shadow effectively change what is seen. Fascinated by the possibility of creating variation within sameness, Lichtenstein decided to produce a mechanical version of these artworks, attempting to reproduce Monet’s experiments through flat colours ranging from yellow to black to signify sunrise and sunset.

The ‘Haystacks’ series makes repetition and variation its central message. Translating Monet’s technique, consisting of systematic juxtapositions of distinct brushstrokes, into his signature Ben Day dots, Lichtenstein boldly addressed contemporary philosophical debates about the value of original artworks and their reproductions. This series unveiled certain hypocritical aspects of art criticism and collection, which valued artworks as commodities rather than as sites of meaning, and elevated artists to godlike figures.

Mechanised, impersonal and mass-produced, Lichtenstein’s ‘Haystacks’ retain their subversive effect. Irreverently combining traditional paintings by a revered nineteenth-century master with a technique reserved for ‘lower’ forms of representation, he demonstrated how the subject matter of his art was not content but form.

CATHEDRAL

Roy Lichtenstein

As well as his ‘Haystacks’ prints, Roy Lichtenstein’s ‘Cathedral’ series of paintings and lithographs was inspired by the exhibition ‘Serial Imagery’, which displayed Monet’s celebrated paintings of the Rouen Cathedral, produced between 1892 and 1893. Monet’s works investigated the effects of light on vision and representation. Depicting the same subject at different time of the day and with different atmospheric conditions, Monet attempted to reproduce the constant variations of perception.

In contrast to Monet’s impressionist brushwork, Lichtenstein employed primary colours and enlarged Ben Day dots to reproduce the cathedral’s façade. As a result, the images appear magnified and simplified, perhaps mimicking low-quality photographic reproductions of Monet’s paintings. Just as Monet’s brushstrokes dissolve when inspected closely, so too do Lichtenstein’s images lose their shape and revert to combinations of Ben Day dots over flat backgrounds.

With this series, Lichtenstein was not interested in exploring the interaction of light and matter, but rather that of printed surface and mass reproduction, and how they can disrupt the everyday practices of vision. He explored this interaction throughout the series by varying the level of colour values in his canvases. In some cases, Lichtenstein juxtaposed the highly contrasting colours yellow and blue, so that the cathedral can be seen clearly and vividly. In other instances, he interlocked yellow and white or blue and black, alluding to intense sunlight and night at its darkest, requiring viewers to examine the painting more carefully.

The ‘Cathedral’ series is perhaps amongst Lichtenstein’s most iconic works. In these canvases he not only paid homage to an artist whose paintings amplified the possibilities of representation, but also explored the discursive potentials of serialisation and mass-production.