’no comment’’ Roy Lichtenstein
He responds to various works with a "no comment," which is his polite way of registering dissatisfaction
"Clearly there's something wrong with me."
In 1960, Lichtenstein was assigned as an assistant professor inNew Jersey. In this period, he met people such as Allan Kaprow,George Segal,Robert Watts and Claes Oldenburg, expanding his field of vision. He was present in a few Happenings in which he did not participate actively. All this supported his imagination; however the real turning point came when one of his sons showed him a Mickey Mousebook and said, "I bet you cannot draw better than this. In 1961, Roy Lichtenstein made six paintings depictingcomic stripframes; he was only changing the colors and forms in his source material. He also started using the Ben-Day dots,calligraphyand speech balloonsduring this period which would later become his trademark.
Lichtenstein became nationally famous, or notorious, in 1964 when Life magazine published an article about him, asking '`Is he the worst artist in America?" His work was widely interpreted then as a critical commentary on modern industrial society because of its allusions to contemporary culture and its pseudomechanical look. But Lichtenstein was reluctant to interpret his own art in those terms. "We like to think of industrialization as being despicable," he told an interviewer in the sixties. "I don't really know what to make of it. There's something terribly brittle about it. I suppose I would still prefer to sit under a tree with a picnic basket than under a gas pump, but signs and comic strips are interesting as subject matter. There are certain things that are usable, forceful and vital about commercial art." The Pop artists, he added, are "using those things, but we're not really advocating stupidity, international teenagerism and terrorism."
The success of these modern masterpieces lies in Lichtenstein zoning in on what he called the “pregnant moment” — the defining point in his source material, encapsulating the whole story — and altering it for maximum visual effect, refining the cartoon techniques with painting traditions, bringing new perspective and composition to the graphic image. The poignant Drowning Girl (1963) was taken from a much larger comic-book image but he zoomed in and cropped it square so that a vortex of waves engulfs the woman’s face.
No one really invented pop art, as all the ingredients were there already: brightly coloured advertisements, consumer goods, pulp fiction. But when Roy Lichtenstein started to copy images of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse from a kid’s book on to canvas, he not only chanced upon a style that would define much of the art of 1960s America, but he became inextricably linked with his own non-invention.
The way Lichtenstein squeegeed paint through a hole-punched screen – tiny red dots for skin tones and blue for sea or sky – meant that he’d removed the touch of the artist a good two years before Andy Warhol’s typically insouciant statement of 1963: ‘Paintings are too hard. I’d like to be a machine, wouldn't you?’ Although Lichtenstein also dabbled in repetition early on – in household images of a hand buttering toast or trying on a wedding ring – his real breakthrough came in his enlargements of cartoon-strip frames from adventure or romance comic books, and it’s a pleasure to encounter so many of them together in this retrospective.
What is marvellous about the irony is that Lichtenstein's carefully conceived and executed reconstruction of an explosively violent brushmark looks much more explosively violent than the real thing. Though ironical, this is not paradoxical. The explosiveness derives from the way the harsh colours are edged with black and by the sharpness of the shapes. But, as to sharpness, I personally feel that the violence derives above all from a metaphor which I always see in the shapes: teeth and other jagged tearing instruments. I asked Lichtenstein whether he meant to put them there. He answered that he didn't. 'I did notice that some of the edges of the brushstrokes looked like explosions and things, but I really wasn't thinking of any other imagery except the obvious.' Here for a change he is utterly decisive about what the paintings mean to him. And it turns out that something which for me is the most impressive feature of his most impressive paintings is something with which he is flatly unconcerned.
In the brushstrokes series, as in the cartoon images of love and war, Lichtenstein takes subjects with a high emotional charge and deals with them as commercial art would 'by a very removed method', as he puts it. 'It's really not so much that I really use that method but that it appears as though I've used it and as though the thing had been done by a committee.'
Lichtenstein's method of doing this is the inverse of Jasper Johns's, the artist whose ironic use of common emblems showed the way to Lichtenstein and the other creators of Pop. Johns takes cool subjects and paints them with soul, or what looks like soul. Lichtenstein takes soulful subjects and paints them with cool, or what looks like cool. In a much-cited interview in 1963 he claimed that he wanted to make an art so "despicable" that no one would hang it. Probably not even he dreamed at the time that collectors would someday pay millions of dollars to put it on their walls. But, then, it was never easy to know how seriously to take Lichtenstein, and it quickly became clear, after his Castelli debut, that his interests actually extended far beyond making the culture of Mickey Mouse and Bazooka bubble gum wrappers into a new heraldic art. He actually quit using comic-book sources by the late sixties. Working fun the same basic mode, he turned out paintings that mimicked Picasso, Cezanne and. Lichtenstein calculates precisely how many black triangles are required to make an engagement ring twinkle. He represents the dimples on a golf ball as a calendar of dark moons, waxing and waning in infinitesimal degrees to describe the ball's curve. The transparency of a magnifying glass is brilliantly evoked in just the right permutations of dots. These images are so striking as to exceed, by far, their nominal subject; which is not so much the objects themselves as their commercial depiction. But it comes to the same thing in Lichtenstein's work. He is always pondering the great conundrum of painting: how to represent in two dimensions on a flat canvas what can be seen and experienced in the three-dimensional world.
But Lichtenstein didn't just reflect the world. The delight in a pedal bin that opens and shuts with the touch of a toe – the diptych is hinged in homage – becomes the rainbow he cannot help adding to his pastiche late Cézanne. The lovelorn girls sinking in tears are poignant, for all their energy, and they turn into the strange late nudes.
Having made his fame and fortune by the early 60s, Lichenstein went on to experiment with new forms and subjects, achieving qualities most wouldn't associate with him at all. 'Sea Shore', a landscape partly painted onto Plexiglas, is oddly serene, while the sculptures are elegantly beautiful.
But in the end the brush as such always seemed to have eluded him. What he was best at was what first inspired him in the world of comics and newspaper advertisements: the power of imagery in simplified form, block colours and half tone dots. He was as strong in three dimensions as two and the show includes a number of examples of his sculptures in ceramic and brass which hint at what he might have done if he had experimented more in materials instead of concentrating on paint.
At a purely formal level, Lichtenstein is perfectly clear about his aims. He knows what he can add to the cartoon images that they haven't got. '’There's a sense of order which is lacking. There is a kind of order in them, there's a sort of composition, but it's a kind of a learned composition. It's a composition more to make it clear, to make it read and communicate, rather than it is a composition for the sake of unifying the elements. In other words, the normal aesthetic sensibility is usually lacking, and I think many people would think it was also lacking in my work. But this is a quality, of course, that I want to get into it.’’