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ROY LICHTENSTEIN AND THE REALIST REVOLT Robert Rosenblum
In the twentieth century, the tempo of artistic change is frighteningly rapid. In America, what was only recently seen as a triumphant new constellation of major painters (whose styles ranged from the "action painting" of Pollock to the "inaction painting" of Rothko) has suddenly receded into a position of "old master" authority that poses a heavy burden upon the younger generation. Some of these "old masters" themselves have found difficulties in maintaining the superb quality they achieved a decade ago; and for their successors, the problem has been even more acute. To yield to the power of what had quickly become a tradition meant an a priori condemnation to a secondary, derivative role. One might be certain of producing beautiful, virtuoso paintings by working within these given premises, but one also risked never creating any truly new ones. To be sure, some recent painters have succeeded against these enormous odds in producing work of extremely high quality and originality (Stella, Louis, and Noland, among them); but ill general, most abstract painting of the later 1950's and early 1960's has begun to look increasingly stale and effete. Even in the hands of the most gifted satellites, it has often turned into a kind of academic product in which rapid, calligraphic brushwork - once the vehicle of daring innovation and intensely personal expression - was codified into a mannered, bravura handicraft a la Sargent; and large-scaled formal simplifications once majestic and emotionally overwhelming - have frequently become merely decorative and hollow. Moreover, a commitment to a purely formal realm, untainted by references to things seen outside the confines of the canvas, began to be felt by many as a narrow restriction that prevented commentary on much that was relevant in contemporary American experience.
Some artists responded to this predicament by reintroducing fragments of reality, either in fictive or in actual presence, within a style that remained essentially dependent upon the "old masters" and especially upon de Kooning. A newer and more adventurous path has rejected still more definitively this dominating father-image by espousing, both in style and in frame of reference, exactly what most of the masterful older generation had excluded. The early flags, targets, and numbers of Jasper Johns were decisive signposts in this new direction. Not only did they reintroduce the most unexpectedly prosaic commonplaces in the poetic language of abstraction; but, equally important, they at first used the actual visual qualities of these images as positive pictorial elements. The flat objects Johns originally painted were painted as flat objects, identical with the picture plane, and not as seen through abstract-expressionist lenses that shuffled and fractured colors, contours, and planes. What was rejuvenating about these works was not only the bald confrontation with a familiar object in the arena of a picture frame, but also the bald clarity of the pictorial style which accepted the disarmingly simple visual data of these signs and symbols - total flatness, clean edges, pure colors, rudimentary design. To spectators accustomed to the dominant modes of abstract painting, these pictures were a jolting tonic, like a C-major chord after a concert of Schoenberg disciples. In the same way, Johns's recent sculptures - beer cans, flashlights, light bulbs - challenged the complex spatial lacerations of abstract by accepting wholly the lucid solid geometries of these mundane, uncomplicated forms.
In the past few years, Johns's brilliant solutions to the problems of a younger American generation have borne new fruit in the work of an amazing number of artists who have attempted, with varying degrees of success and many failures, to undermine the authority of both the abstract and expressionist components of abstract expressionism. The sheer quantity of these artists amounts virtually to a revolution or, at the very least, a revolt, among whose major manifestoes are the paintings of Roy Lichtenstein.
In a sense, Lichtenstein's position may be compared to Courbet's. To the French master in the 1850's, both sides of the Ingres-Delacroix coin presented an artificial idealism of style and subject which he combatted not only by the intrusion of vulgar content whether toiling workers or sweating whores - but also by the adaptation of vulgar styles, particularly popular prints, images d'Epinal, whose stiff composition and childlike drawing offered an earthy antidote to the weakening stylistic conventions of the Romantic and Neoclassic modes. In the same way, Lichtenstein embraces not only the content, but also the style, of popular imagery in mid-twentieth-century America as a means of invigorating the moribund mannerisms of abstract painting. It is revealing that negative criticism of his art has generally been phrased in the same terms as negative criticism of Courbet's art - the subjects are considered too ridiculously ugly, the style too preposterously coarse for "art." The idealist voice of the mid-nineteenth-century academy has been replaced by the no less idealist voice of the mid-twentieth-century one.
Like Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist, Lichtenstein has chosen the ugliest and most ubiquitous kind of commercial imagery - comic strips, soapbox diagrams, cheap advertising illustrations - as a source for his reformatory art. In place of the aesthetic idealism of recent abstract painting, he substitutes the most vulgar realism of a mass culture's visual environment. The abstract expressionist's veneration of personal brushstroke and private emotion is now opposed by a machine-produced style derived from an industrial, public domain. But just as Stuart Davis and Léger obliged us to realize that twentieth-century urban imagery could be metamorphosed into works of art, so, too, does Lichtenstein force us to examine American commercial illustration in terms of its aesthetic potential. As in the case of Johns's early flags, what is important is not only what is painted, but how it is painted. It is at first most unsettling, of course, to see the humanoid figures of a comic-strip frame blown up to easel-picture size; but the same comic-strip imagery painted in a style borrowed from, say, de Kooning would have far less conviction and force, creating instead a tepid compromise between the true nature of the subject and an alien pictorial manner. What is remarkable about Lichtenstein is that he has absorbed not only the sociological aspects of commercial illustration, but also its pictorial implications. With an irony familiar to the twentieth-century tradition, he has transformed non-art into art. His pictures are not only fascinating as imaginative commentaries on their popular sources, but also as abstract pictorial inventions whose power may initially be concealed by the unfamiliarity of his choice of subject. A case in point is Little Aloha. Enlarged to the dimensions of an oil painting and therefore placed in the context of a work of art, this Hawaiian love goddess obliges us to scrutinize her as we never did before. She may first be looked at as a distressing sociological phenomenon, a member of a strange new race bred by the twentieth century. Embodying a popular American erotic fantasy, this vulgarized descendant of Ingres' and Gauguin's odalisques is startlingly ugly, though her monstrous vapidity, alternately grotesque and comical, is consistently hypnotic. Her fascination, however, resides not only in the cultural shock of really examining for the first time a spectacle so common that we have always closed our eyes to it, but also in the visual surprise of perceiving closely the mechanized pictorial conventions that produce this creature. Much as many nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists were excited by the unfamiliar flatness and simple linear means of styles that ranged from Greek vase-painting and Japanese prints to children's drawings and primitive textiles, Lichtenstein now explores the mass-produced images of the crassest commercial illustration. By magnifying these images, he reveals a vocabulary of uncommon rudeness and strength. Coarse and inky contours, livid primary colors, screens of tiny dots, arid surfaces suddenly emerge as vigorous visual challenges to the precious refinements of color, texture, line, and plane found in the abstract-expressionist vocabulary.
Like all artists, however, Lichtenstein has chosen his visual sources discriminately and has learned to manipulate them in the creation of a style that has become uniquely his. From the multiple possibilities offered by commercial illustration, he has selected those devices which produce a maximum of pictorial flatness - thick black outlines that always cling to a single plane; an opaque, unyielding paint surface that bears no traces of handicraft; insistently two-dimensional decorative patterns - woodcut arabesques and mechanically regimented rows of dots - that symbolize texture and modelling. Thus, the Hawaiian girl is first seen as an illusion of the most voluptuously contoured anatomy, but these sensual swellings are quickly and brutally ironed out by the two-dimensional conventions of Lichtenstein's style. Like the nudes of Ingres, whose anatomies become so monstrous when extracted from their compressed spaces, Lichtenstein's exotic lady offers a compelling tension between the abstract autonomy of sinuous contour and compositional flatness, and the resulting distortions of a jointless arm, a muscleless throat, a boneless face. Throughout the painting this interplay of style and subject commands attention, whether one looks at the rude contrast between a flat black and flat red shape that creates a lipsticked mouth, the rich, curvilinear inventions that indicate shading and texture in the cascades of black, perfumed hair; the totally flat patterns of tiny red dots that alternately become rounded, pink flesh. Head, Yellow and Black belongs to the same genetic and pictorial race. The American counterpart of her Hawaiian cousin, she is a pretty girl of the domestic variety; but again, studied closely, the total vacancy of expression and the amphibian physiognomy provide a shocking sociological observation, which, in turn, is supported by an equally startling pictorial invention. The cosmetic complexities of mascaraed eyes, tweezed eyebrows, and permanent waves are transformed into linear abstractions of almost Art Nouveau fantasy. This rich visual incident is then contrasted to the taut and bleak expanses of empty skin surface, monotonously textured background, and mat black dress, so that the whole creates a calculated pictorial intricacy surprising in what seems, to begin with, so crude an image.
In The Kiss, the "girl next door" meets her mate, a virile Air Force pilot who seems to have dropped from the clouds in order to provide the total ecstasy that, in a less secularized society, was once experienced by a swooning Santa Teresa. This fervent embrace - a crushing fusion of blonde hair, a military uniform, polished fingernails, deeply closed eyes, and a momentarily grounded airplane - is again masterfully composed in terms of a remarkable variety of linear and textural invention, witness only the sweeping descent of erotic abandon that begins with the pilot's visor and continues downward through the forehead of Miss America, the part in her hair, and finally the knuckles of the clenched male fist.
Lichtenstein's sociological exploration of American mores is further elaborated in the Eddie Diptych, which describes the dramatic rupture between teen-age daughter and disapproving parents so common in popular fiction. Ironically reviving the narrative means of a medieval religious painting (a diptych with long verbal description, here both soliloquy and dialogue), the Eddie Diptych presents a comic-strip crisis in which the ingredients of Western tragedy are bizarrely reflected. Youthful rebellion, parental opposition, omnipotent love are recreated by the dram atis personae of this vulgar literary medium with results that are at once funny and disturbing as an accurate mirror of modern popular culture. Pictorially, the diptych is no less intriguing. The colors - the harshest yellow, green, blue, red - produce flat and acid surfaces of unfamiliar visual potency; and the complex lettering is used ingeniously as both a means of asserting the composition's taut flatness and as a delicate decorative pattern of black and white that relieves the assaulting intensity of the opaque colors. The enclosing white frame of the right wing and the structure of the lettering in the left wing - a column arranged around a vertical axis of symmetry - are particularly handsome pictorial devices culled from comic-strip sources but assimilated to Lichtenstein's personal style.
If Lichtenstein has imagined new heights and depths of American comic-strip drama, he has also considered the more prosaic domain of American advertising. The national fetish for domestic cleanliness revealed in ads for everything from soap flakes to bathroom deodorizers is reflected in a number of pictures that extoll the virtues of Good Housekeeping. In Woman Cleaning, the gigantic head of a synthetic housewife smiles down at us to register the pleasure and ease of a periodic refrigerator cleaning. In other pictures, these sanitary rituals are further dehumanized. Following the images of mechanization that Léger had explored in the 1920's, Lichtenstein at times shows a disembodied hand performing a simple functional operation. In Spray, only the pressure of a housewife's manicured finger is necessary to freshen domestic air; in Sponge, the effortless sweep of a lady's left hand works cleansing miracles. Here again, the mass-produced coarseness of Lichtenstein's visual sources - the diagrams on the labels of sanitary products - is unexpectedly transformed by a witty pictorial imagination. In Sponge, for instance, the blank, untextured areas vividly convey textures as unlike as skin, sponge, and enamel, just as the familiar screen of dots derived from cheap printing processes is instantly identified with a coat of dust and grime.
Similar hygienic concerns dominate Step-On Can with Leg, where the compartmented, sequential arrangement of "how-to-use" diagrams inspires a two-part pictorial demonstration of how a flowered garbage pail is opened by stepping on the pedal. The dainty pressure of a high-heeled shoe, as seen on the left, is apparently sufficient to raise the lid, as seen on the right. Pictorial as well as mechanical rewards are offered in Box Two, where the checkered pattern of a dress, now visible in the upper lefthand corner, and the changed position of the garbage part complicate the simple symmetry of the image in Box One. A diptych is again used in Like New, in which the "before-and-after" demonstrations of American advertising are transformed into a painting whose abstract qualities are more explicit than usual in Lichtenstein's work. Here an ad for invisible weaving is surprisingly enlarged in a two-part symmetrical design. What first seems, however, a boxingly tidy regularity of mechanically repeated dots and sawtooth edges is unexpectedly upset by the darkened, irregular aureole in the left panel, which is suddenly recognized as a cigarette burn in a swatch of cloth. There could hardly be a better example of Lichtenstein's ability to recreate the tawdry visual environment of commercial imagery as an extraordinary abstract invention.
Lichtenstein's inventory of American popular culture includes any number of cherished objects that range from ice-cream sodas and new tires to beefsteaks and dishwashers. Like the machine-made creatures who use them, these objects are mass-produced forms of unforgettable ugliness. Black Flowers provides the Woolworth's contribution to the art of flower arrangement - a hideous china vase stuffed with a cornucopian abundance of poppies that must be made of plastic, and, similarly, the art of jewelry descends to the kitsch splendors of an advertised engagement ring whose crowning glories must surely be a glass pearl and two zircons. These 1984 horrors of mass production extend as well to food. Turkey, the American dream of a holiday dinner, becomes an inedible, inorganic merchandising product; and Lichtenstein's other selections from supermarket and drugstore displays are no less synthetic and indigestible conclusions to the pleasures and graces of the Western still-life tradition.
Even more startling are Lichtenstein's recent comments on another familiar product of American merchandising - great works of art. Appropriate to a period in which the Sistine Ceiling can be bought together with toothpaste and breakfast food, Lichtenstein focuses the mechanized lens of mass production on these sacrosanct, handmade relies of the Western tradition. Man with Folded Hands looks at a great Cézanne portrait through the eye, first, of a reductive compositional analysis in a published study of Cézanne, and then through the eye of Lichtenstein's own style in which wall plane and dado become a screen of printer's dots, infinitely reproducible, and the figure becomes a simplified lin ear diagram that transforms it into the pictorial equivalent of plastic flowers. This reinterpretation of artistic tradition in the commercial light of the 1960's is even more astonishing in Lichtenstein's version of Picasso's Femme au chapeau. Here the horror of a Picasso head of the 1940's - part human, part bull, part dog - becomes still more bizarre when read through Lichtenstein's vocabulary. The flat, opaque colors and vigorous black outlines are consonant enough with Picasso's own style to permit the grotesque force of the original painting to be felt; but this comical ugliness is further compounded by imposing the mass-produced schematization of a comic-strip image upon it. In the realist tradition of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Lichtenstein has found his content in a fresh examination of the shocking new commonplaces of modern experience that had previously been censored from the domain of art; and in that tradition, he has suddenly rendered visible what familiarity had prevented us from really seeing, whether comic-strip dramas or Picasso reproductions. More than that, he has succeeded in assimilating the ugliness of his subjects into new works of art, whose force and originality may even help to reconcile us to the horrors of the Brave New World in which we live.
