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Diane Waldman
In the confusion attending the birth of a movement, the penchant for group identification is all but predictable. The problem arises after the event has occurred when the identification persists, despite fundamental differences in style among the artists working in a particular idiom. One need only recall the multitude of artists all too easily appropriated to Pop art to realize that the label served to obscure rather than clarify the situation. A label should more properly serve to record a moment, not a movement, or for that matter an individual. What the term provided was a declaration of the bond between these artists based on their use of the banal as subject. While this is a valid approach it offers little more than an interpretation of the most easily apprehended features of a work. At this level it also fails to distinguish between a major artist and the second or third rate practitioner of a style or to evaluate accurately the contribution of the major artist to his time. For the subject matter of any art form, whether comic strip or stripe, cannot be innovating without related formal innovations. One of the advantages of the "abstract" tradition was that it revealed to us, without the distractions of a representational subject matter, the process by which an artist went about making art. This lesson is as applicable to Pop art as it is to recent color abstraction, although the form that it takes is necessarily different. This is not to deny the importance of subject matter but simply to reaffirm that subject matter functions in any significant art form as the bridge by which the artist accomplishes the transition from the idea into art. It is against this framework that the substantive issues must be discussed, a development that has yet to take place. Among the major proponents of Pop to have been subject to this lack of critical perception, Roy Lichtenstein is surely one of the most misunderstood.
In the notorious marriage of a wholly radical subject matter with the methods of fine art, Roy Lichtenstein brought to a level of consciousness, both visual and intellectual, ail awareness of the American life style and brilliantly proclaimed the comic strip as a fitting theme for the new American painting of the 1960's. One was forced to confront images of a new "reality" that challenged our accepted values and ways of seeing art. The advent of common household items as objects of pictorial concern is anathema to many, although it is easy enough to make an intellectual accommodation within the long tradition of genre painting. But the use of a cartoon type of imagery has proved an even greater stumbling block to an appreciation of Roy Lichtenstein's painting. Where the objects of Oldenburg or even Warhol's subjects have eventually become palatable. Lichtenstein's subject matter has remained singularly difficult. Both Oldenburg and Warhol, in their different ways, have employed a consistent but relatively limited repertoire of subjects which have been accepted largely by virtue of their familiarity. Lichtenstein, on the other hand, frequently changes his subject matter, using themes as diverse as cartoons and cathedrals, landscapes and the thirties, brushstrokes and pyramids, consequently catching his audience off guard. The need for such a protean subject matter is the stimulation that it provides the artist to extend the range of his formal ideas. This procedure has also allowed him continually to test an essential component of his style, the articulation between a "real" image and an abstract style. By placing optimum pressure on the subject, he is able to control the transformation from the original object to the finished image and to integrate convincingly the object with the picture plane. For some critics, however, Lichtenstein is all subject. They have acclaimed him for his iconoclastic subject matter, admiring the social and literary implications of the cartoon, and the possibility of treating any subject in comic strip style. To assume that the power and originality of Lichtenstein's work depends primarily upon its subject is to misunderstand the intent of his work. By its very nature, such an assumption implies that a sensational subject matter must be followed by an ever more outrageous one. This is, of course, not the case, for the landscapes, the brushstrokes, the modern paintings are consistent in their indication of another objective, the exploration of form.
The interest in the object was common to many artists working in the early 1960's. Among them, several artists, notably Kaprow and Oldenburg were experimenting with Happenings and the use of objects as important props for their performances. The use of such an imagery was not exactly new to Lichtenstein (Ten Dollar Bill, 1956). His earlier paintings, dating to the mid-fifties, covered such subjects as treaty signing, cowboys and Indians, other vintage Americana. Although he abandoned these paintings for Abstract Expressionism, which occupied him from 1957-1960, he soon began to introduce comic figures into these paintings and, in 1961, to work with the cartoon alone. Look Mickey is one of several paintings he did in the spring and summer of 1961 (other subjects were Donald Duck and Popeye) in which the image is handled in a low comedy manner. He replaced this type of cartoon with another that allowed him a greater flexibility than was possible to achieve with the first ones. He also began to feature ordinary household objects as the subjects of his paintings and it is in the development of a "kitchen" culture that he and Oldenburg are closely related at this time. Both Lichtenstein and Oldenburg tended to emphasize the single object, an emphasis that Oldenburg has for the most part retained while Lichtenstein has alternated between a single object and an allover or multiple focus composition. The objectness of Pop is the direct outcome of the influence of Johns and Rauschenberg. Both artists placed maximum stress on the actual physical attributes of an object. Johns' great contribution was to make a flag or a target both a literal object and a statement about the rectangle. Alone among the Pop painters, Lichtenstein has dematerialized the object and effected a new reconciliation with the picture plane. This is a significant device for it allows an object both its original identity (we retain our sense of the object as a three-dimensional form) and a new one. Oldenburg has pursued the transformation of the object in another way by recreating one three-dimensional object into another fully realized version of the same. Lichtenstein's use of a figure and ground, single image format, based on Picasso, was the means by which he made explicit the integration of the object with the picture plane. For the transformation of the object to be successful it is necessary to maintain an equilibrium between the original object and the translation of that object. In Lichtenstein's paintings the means of achieving this entails the conjoining of a "real" image and an abstract style. The use of such an image brings with it all the data we need to recall the actual object. The abstract style, on the other hand, serves another function, to transcend the literalness of the object. This allows Lichtenstein to reconcile the actual object and the image of the object on the picture plane. This is a crucial departure from Johns who wanted to make the flag or the target a literal object. The less apparent the change from the original source, the more effective the concept of transformation. It is for this reason that the cartoon paintings are Lichtenstein's most extreme and disturbing statement. None of the other Pop artists has approached him in the precarious hair-splitting balance that he creates between the actual object and the transformed image. The process of transformation brings into focus several of his major propositions: the importance of choice in the selection of subjects and the ability to transform them into works of art. To this he brings his capacity to transcend his subject matter, making it totally his yet preserving the essence of its original nature. This ability to alter reality enables him to confer on the most common of subjects an esthetic orientation entirely foreign to its condition. Then too, the very methods of transformation entail an adjustment of visual images and confirm the subsidiary role of subject matter in relation to formal ideas.
In the single object paintings of 1961-1962, like Black Flowers, the relationship between the subject-figure and the benday background is clearly that of a flattened although still somewhat apparent two-plane relationship. The difference in scale between the benday dots, especially small at this time, and the primary figure-shape created a perceptible distinction in the surface plane. This change in scale did not make an immediate impression because the painting had few half-tone references and was basically linear in treatment. The emphasis on the linear rather than on the volumetric quality of a three dimensional object enabled the object to remain stable in relation to the picture plane. In the later single object paintings there is a gradual adjustment of these possibilities and a more thorough articulation of figure and ground. The figure-ground relationship occurs again in the brushstroke series of 1965-1966 with two changes - the substantially enlarged benday dot and the use of a literally two-dimensional image - that replace the earlier linear control of figure and ground and maintain a more convincing relationship with the picture plane. Golf Ball, 1962, is composed of a series of black and white arcs that form an abstract pattern reminiscent of Mondrian's plus and minus system. At the same time, by means of their placement, the black and white lines conform to the shape of a three-dimensional object. But the placement of the golf ball on a neutral ground once again neutralizes the object as a volumetric form. This manipulation of the two and three dimensional is one that the artist obviously relishes for he returns to it repeatedly. Temple of Apollo, 1964, and Study for the Great Pyramid, 1969 are but two examples in which a fully realized form is translated into a purely pictorial two-dimensional image.
An important feature of Lichtenstein's use of the cartoon is the change in scale, the enlargement from the miniscule to easel or wall size, much like the gigantic blow-ups of Oldenburg. Unlike Oldenburg, however, Lichtenstein's enlargements have none of the sense of Olympian abandon or the tactility that we associate with the painterly extravagance of Abstract Expressionism. Lichtenstein's work manifests an elegant refinement and intellectual precision that is both an inherent part of his personality and a decided reaction against Abstract Expressionism. In his use of magnification and distortion, the images are blown up beyond recognition and reassembled into separate units which have an identity apart from the original. In removing a strip from its relationship to the other frames of a cartoon, it becomes both strangely complete and considerably different from its source. This alteration seals the images in time and elevates them to the status of signs. What Lichtenstein creates for us, then, are stereotypes of our culture - a Hollywood sunset, a crying girl, an embracing couple. Although he works with representational images, they can hardly be called naturalistic. He emphasizes this by featuring the urban society, often viewing man by way of his artifacts, and by approaching his subjects indirectly usually through reproductions. This conscious stylization of his motifs may have derived from the comic strip which is itself a highly artificial way of representing reality. Lichtenstein has adapted this method but discarded the approximation to reality of the continuous narrative of the comic strip. There is no doubt, however, that the comic strip was suited to his needs, not the reverse, as an examination of his work of the midfifties will indicate. In heightening this sense of artifice with the use of a realistic imagery, he is strongly reminiscent of Fragonard and Boucher.
Lichtenstein achieved one remarkable effect with the incorporation of the title or legend as a functioning element into the body of a work. Rather than using the title as appendage or accessory to the visual, as a label clue or as a play on illusion, Lichtenstein forced a direct confrontation between the verbal and the visual. Both the verbal and the visual statements exist on a single plane so that the image forms a totally integrated unit. But the spectator response to the set of visual phenomena is quite separate from the reaction to the verbal phenomena. We are encouraged to read, hum, sing, or make other noises, in other words to talk back to the paintings. Other early paintings, like Fastest Gun, 1963, convey the impression of a TV camera zooming in for a climactic moment. Somewhat like the response to the "Big Screen," the spectator is drawn into the space of a painting, figuratively speaking, and can frequently become involved with the emotion of the event as he reads: "Okay Hot-Shot! I'm Pouring!" or "I Don't Care! I'd Rather Sink ... Than Call Brad For Help! " This emotional outpouring is in marked contrast to the coolness of the technique and it is noteworthy that Lichtenstein chooses to utilize this apparent contrast between the style (cool) and the subject (hot). It is apparent that the artist is a master of the complex statement. Cross references abound in a spirit of ironic play and bring with them an undeniable humor.
From around 1963 certain pictorial devices which had appeared occasionally in the paintings of 1961-1962 begin to occur with increasing frequency. These include a kind of curved and at times almost baroque line which could designate anything from clouds to a woman's hair; the sharp zig-zag of the comic strip reappeared in the spiraling cloud formations of a landscape and again in the zooming diagonals of the modern paintings; the dots expanded into fields of modulated color which acted as a ground tied together by his lines and created out of the canvas a taut and rigid screen. Another feature of these paintings is the greater use of a cropped image to suggest the continuation of the image beyond the perimeters of the canvas and to identify the image with the rectangle. This change from the single image to the allover composition is most effective from this time. It undoubtedly derives from the artist's own observation of, and experimentation with, Abstract Expressionism.
Lichtenstein's working method is one that he established with the cartoons: a precision arrived at after a certain trial and error. He selects motifs from illustrations or other second-hand sources and recomposes these images, small in scale, into equally small sketches. The idea of giganticism, whether a 1930's facade, the bravura brushstroke, or an Egyptian pyramid reduced to a minute scale and then enlarged, via the projector, into a facsimile of the original, is nothing if not Dada in the extreme. Once the sketch is enlarged to the scale of the canvas and transferred, it is subject to a series of adjustments of drawing, shape, and color sequences. When he arrives at a satisfying image the benday dots are filled in by his assistants. He does everything else on the paintings himself. Within the appearance of regularity and impersonality that are a feature of his paintings there is an amazing wealth of detail - a love of contour, of the texture created by the juxtaposition of the benday dots with solid color areas, of the irregular shape playing against the pure geometry of a rectangle, a circle or a square; the thickness or thinness of a line and its placement; or the width of a color stripe. The opposition of verticals and horizontals, a more complex interlocking visual scheme, larger areas of color, and the use of white rather than commercially primed canvas alone to give added intensity to the colors around it lend the recent paintings a greater sense of compactness than the earlier work. The comic strip, the landscape, the brushstroke all depended, to varying degrees, on an actuality that the thirties theme does not require. This has, in turn, freed the recent work of some of its purely descriptive function and brought it into an oblique, if unintended, relationship to recent formal abstraction, particularly recent Stella, an affinity that indicates the considerable distance between Lichtenstein and the other Pop artists.
The 1930's series began with a poster that Lichtenstein designed in the fall of 1966 for Lincoln Center. Its subject: the architecture and design of the 1930's: theater marquees, the stepped facades of buildings like Radio City Music Hall or all of Rockefeller Center for that matter, industrial and accessory design, automobile grilles and banisters. He has captured the very feel of the thirties - the clumsy overstuffed forms, the rigid geometry and repetition of forms, the use of ornate details, in short the total ambience of the urban landscape. The paintings have a residual nostalgia - for the past, for a childhood of the thirties, for movie madness - that, like all of his subject matter, never deteriorates into sentimentality. The Pop use of a subject matter of common origins was employed by Lichtenstein in the comic strips, the landscapes, especially the sunsets, and in the use of popular cultural phenomena like The Temple of Apollo or The Great Pyramid. The brushstrokes were a departure in their reference to a non-popular imagery, Abstract Expressionism, while the current series is a partial return to a more common mode, to a period that has recently become increasingly popular among fashionable taste.
As a theme, the thirties offers innumerable associations other than the formal possibilities that it suggests: reference to an earlier fashion, a comment on the geometric painting of van Doesburg, Vantongerloo, et al that inspired it: to much of current painting - Stella and Noland - which owes something in turn to the earlier art or design. His is an art of reference - to subject matter and to other art styles. An interest in Mondrian's color and structure that was apparent even in the comic strips took even more explicit form in the Non-Objective I of 1964, and reappears here in yet another way. Again, it should be considered that his actual Mondrian paintings were not meant to be homages but were used as subject matter solely. This, of course, has created a situation in which an artist who understood and used many of Mondrian's ideas could paint a painting of a Mondrian using it as subject matter which he combined with his knowledge of the artist's ideas and fused with his own unique vision. From his understanding of preceding art forms and his willingness to use anything that suits his needs, he has created an art of strength through many dialogues and ultimately a highly original art.
The forms - circle, square, are, arranged in a way reminiscent of the thirties, in sets of threes, for example - are cropped in a way that gives enough information for a frame of reference. They are dense and complete within the canvas and cut-off at the edges. Lines of speed appear to converge, or diverge within the canvas; what Lichtenstein creates, in effect, is a center of tension or hub of energy without focus that tapers off at the edges of the canvas. In addition, the thrust is enervated not only by the open-ended forms, a device that first appeared in the landscapes, but by the bulge and swelling of the irregular silhouettes and the closed contours of the geometric forms. Although movement is implied in the use of fast diagonals, it is a movement contained within the usually rectangular dimensions of the canvas. Within the canvas itself the forms are locked in by a black silhouette; the only areas without a contour are certain portions of the benday dots. The dots, as they have increased in size and technical proficiency, have also attained a fascinating sub-form of their own, serving dual roles: as change of scale and as half tone. Because of their prominence as a pattern they serve not only to separate areas of solid color, along with the black brushstroke, but also to create the illusion of volume. This illusion is contradicted not only by the broad flat areas of color which frame them but also by the appearance of the dots as a flat two-dimensional pattern elsewhere on the same canvas. Lichtenstein uses the half-tone along with overlapping forms, recession lines and points of focus which he transforms, as freely as his subject matter, into a new pictorial scheme, one that calls into question the very premises that it appears to establish. He has determined his own way of confronting the picture plane using both two- and three-dimensional illusion. That this is one of his underlying interests is apparent in his recent sculpture in which he brings line into space.
The earliest work, Modern Sculpture, 1967, is a skeletal structure that offers little to the spectator in the way of a concrete form occupying a defined space. Lichtenstein not only disregards the usual conventions for sculpture, he heightens the ambiguity. The lower portion of the sculpture, the part that relates to the floor, bulges out frontally while the upper portion opens out at the rear. A mirror, attached to the top, conveys an illusion of depth similar to the "shaded" benday areas in the thirties paintings. The total structure, with its Picassoesque play on illusion and reality, reflecting brass surfaces and shifting unstable elements, appears to dematerialize and recompose itself of its own volition. In the pieces that follow he has simplified the relationships preferring to keep the sculpture more resolutely linear. As a result the sense of ambiguity, although still a factor in several of the pieces, is a less dominating force. The relationship to floor and wall planes is consequently more straightforward and more consistently linear. The latest work, Large Sculpture, 1969, bears an uncanny resemblance to both banisters and to designs like Frank Lloyd Wright's decorative grills for the Guggenheim Museum.
Unlike the sculpture, in which illusion plays such an important role, the color in Lichtenstein's paintings, full strength and brilliant in hue, allows little tolerance for spatial illusionism. It too is secondary source material, deriving from the colors used on commercial packaging. And it also relates to Mondrian's color arrangements to which the artist has added the occasional use of green. Lichtenstein was impressed by the impersonality of advertising color and the fact that one color could be used for different objects. He has adapted not only the strong contrast of advertising color but use of one color for multiple purposes. His color is also a reaction against Abstract Expressionism in which color was often used to convey a specific emotional content.
In effect, Lichtenstein rewards us with a highly complex visual and intellectual statement. It is in the equilibrium established by working part against part, fragment against fragment that be is able to produce a memorable imagery and to discover the psychological reactions we have to a specific subject matter. As Ingres was able to paint the ideal woman, Lichtenstein is able to present us with a new vision, not one based on the comic strip but more probably based on his understanding of modern art. Starting with a specific subject matter, he arrives at a general or ideal image. When an eighteenth century artist chose to render a cloud, we clearly understand that it is fictitious. Lichtenstein is able to spell out the image cloud on his canvas so that the mind and the imagination can envision the real one.
Exhibition catalogue, Roy Lichtenstein, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1969
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