2024-07-07 19:58:23
The beauty with an adorably furrowed brow has just a second to go before she is engulfed in a water vortex. “I don’t care! I’d rather drown than call Brad for help!” he exclaims. However, according to the laws of American comics, he will definitely not die. Brad appears, snatches the girl from the water element and doesn’t even mess up himself – but the painter Roy Lichtenstein didn’t capture that.
Vienna (from our colleague) – The nearly two-meter-long painting called Drowning Girl from 1963 became the eye-catcher of a major retrospective of the artist who, along with Andy Warhol, was considered the father of pop art. The exhibition is hosted by the Albertina in Vienna on the occasion of the author’s 100th birthday, which he missed last year. It presents over 90 paintings and sculptures borrowed from three dozen world museums. It will last until July 14.
The New York artist, who lived from 1923 to 1997 and was the first to use the visual language of advertisements or comics, is a big attraction in itself. However, the visitor who takes the gallery escalator to the basement halls of the Albertina awaits more than just a meeting with the star.
Lichtenstein’s oil on canvas called The Drowning Girl is from 1963. | Photo: The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence
As expected, the scenes are beautifully retro, funny, colorful and point to pervasive commercialism or silly stereotypes. However, what the viewer will probably not be prepared for is the encounter with the painting. Roy Lichtenstein, unlike the deified Andy Warhol, remained a classical artist at heart. He was even an academic painter with a surprising foray into sculpture.
In front of the canvas with the tearful face of a girl who refuses to call Brad, the author stood with a brush. He even painted millions of colored dots by hand, imitating the printing technique.
Only an encounter with the original, as offered by the Vienna exhibition, gives the possibility to realize the difference: it looks like a print, it refers to a printed matter, but it is a painting. In addition, unexpectedly oversized. They have a somewhat hypnotic effect on the audience, the figures and mere faces and hands are as big as a window in the wall. It is an experience to see images that came from newspaper ads and “strips” as the painter intended them, not as they are known today – scaled down again, printed in a book, in a magazine, or on a monitor screen.
Lichtenstein’s famous oil on canvas Look, Mickey from 1961. | Photo: National Gallery in Washington
There are a number of familiar motifs: The girl in tears, the girl in the bath, lovers in an embrace, the hand with the spray, sneakers, even Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse on the fish that started it all in 1961.
A well-known story goes that once the young sons asked their not-yet-famous father if he could draw their favorite comic book heroes. They thought that Lichtenstein, who was an assistant professor of art at the State University of New York at Oswego at the time, could not do this, and therefore painted abstractly. That’s how a picture called Look, Mickey, inspired by a children’s comic, was created.
In fact, comic characters appeared in Lichtenstein’s work seven years earlier. It was only on the basis of the painting Look, Mickey that the influential New York gallerist Leo Castelli saw him in 1961 and signed a contract with him. The same year, Andy Warhol presented his work to Castelli, but he did not enter the gallerist’s “stable” until three years later.
The ubiquity of ads
Lichtenstein’s golden age began with Castelli, in 1962 he had his first pop art exhibition in New York. The term pop-art was already in the air, other pioneers of the new style also had solo shows, in addition to Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and James Rosenquist.
Roy Lichtenstein could slowly leave his job and become a freelance artist. The first exhibition with Castelli was a promise to make a living from free work – even before its opening, the paintings were bought by collectors who had priority access to the gallery.
Roy Lichtenstein (pictured in 1967) was considered the father of pop art along with Andy Warhol. | Photo: Wikimedia Commons – Eric Koch (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Lichtenstein began to be inspired by chewing gum wrappers, billboards on the street, cinema advertisements, advertisements in telephone books and comics. He has learned to use stereotypes that appeal to the masses. Like advertising magicians, he always painted perfectly groomed young women, their open or tragic gestures, he used text bubbles.
Captivated by the aggressiveness of advertising and its ubiquity during the economic boom, he began to research, ironize and use it as a provocation. According to the Viennese curator Gunhilda Bauer, his paintings can be read as an analogy of the women’s protest movement of the time, as well as the resistance against the American war in Vietnam.
“America was hit by industrialization and capitalism earlier and more strongly than the rest of the world. Its values suddenly seemed distorted. I think the meaning of my work is precisely to show that the same thing will happen all over the world,” the artist declared in 1963.
He also perfected the imitation of industrial printing. He painted black contours, colored surfaces in basic colors, often “beating” each other, and covered other surfaces with colored dots, imitating the printing technique named after its inventor from the second half of the 19th century, Ben Day dots.
Dots evolved throughout Lichtenstein’s career. At first he painted them by hand, later he made disposable tin or paper stencils. The size and density also varied. The larger and sparser the dotted grid, the younger the images.
Unlike the deified Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein was a classical artist at heart. Pictured is his oil and acrylic on canvas Figures in a Landscape from 1977. | Photo: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humblebæk, Denmark
Accusations of plagiarism
The Viennese show at the beginning revives the artist’s first exhibitions. Roy Lichtenstein was probably at his most provocative then. According to him, he did not have much sympathy for the stereotype of the beautiful, perfect and self-sufficient young heroines he painted.
“The type of women I paint are black lines and red dots. I see them abstractly. It’s hard to fall in love with them, they’re not real at all. When I was a little boy looking at comics, those women were really convincing. I seriously thought they were very beautiful. Now I can only see the drawing, it doesn’t dazzle me anymore,” he said.
Lichtenstein acrylic and screen print on canvas The Fastest Gun of 1963. | Photo: Galerie Mitterrand
He did not say how he felt about the men who in Lichtenstein’s paintings had prominent lower jaws. Quite often they were named Brad, for example the one from the painting called Masterpiece, which became the author’s most expensive work when an unknown collector auctioned it in 2017 – twenty years after the painter’s death – for 165 million dollars.
Masculinity and its form in commercial production was also Lichtenstein’s theme. In addition to female motifs – a crying girl’s face, a hand with painted nails – he abstracted a detail from the “man’s world”. A painting from 1963 called The Fastest Gun nails the viewer to the floor like a gunshot. For now, the over-enlarged colt remains holstered in the bright yellow belt at the cowboy’s side. However, the hand in the white glove is ready to pull.
Roy Lichtenstein was, of course, “convicted” of plagiarism from the beginning. Sometimes amiably, as successful comic book writer William Overgard did, sometimes indignantly.
Art history professor Erle Loran from the University of California at Berkeley published his “discovery” that Lichtenstein copied from an art textbook in two art magazines, ARTnews and Artforum. The painter responded to this in 1963 with a self-portrait in which he styles himself as a comic book villain with a text bubble: “What? Why do you ask? What do you know about my photocopier?”
The painting was printed a year later by Life magazine with the headline “Is he the worst painter in the US?”, a paraphrase of a Jackson Pollock photograph published by the same magazine in 1949. It accompanied an article asking “Is he the best living painter in the United States?” That article drew a lot of attention to Pollock at the time, which finally brought recognition to the abstract expressionist painter.
The exhibition of works by Roy Lichtenstein in the Vienna Albertina will last until July 14. | Photo: AFP / Profimedia.cz
To make it ugly enough
The line between Lichtenstein and Pollock has a deeper meaning. The pop-art creator didn’t just respond to ubiquitous advertising with his style. According to curator Gunhilda Bauer, he was primarily opposed to the then-glorified abstract expressionism, such as Jackson Pollock’s giant canvases wildly splashed with liters of paint.
Lichtenstein “corresponded to the aggressiveness, large format, overcrowding and expansive energy that grows far beyond the edge of the picture,” the curator believes.
“Abstract expressionism seems very human, my work on the contrary. They are pseudo-mechanical, they look as if they were created by a machine, as if without thought. They seem totally insensitive,” the painter described his works. When asked what pop art actually is, he replied: “I don’t know. I guess if the content of the painting is commercial work. It was hard to find something ugly enough. It already seemed that even a dirty dripping rag had become acceptable, that people got used to it . The one thing everyone hates is advertising.”
The exhibition also presents works inspired by works from European art history. Lichtenstein was most attracted to cubism and surrealism in this regard. He even transformed Japanese landscapes into his dotted style reminiscent of industrial printing – his 1996 oil entitled Treetops in the Mist is on display.
He never quoted a specific painting, yet it is usually easy to tell who he is referring to. Lichtenstein paraphrased the motifs and compositions of René Magritte, Hans Arp, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí and most often Pablo Picasso.
The Vienna retrospective offers an even wider view of Lichtenstein’s sculptural work, which the author perceived as an extension of his paintings. If the viewer has energy left and happily avoids the “column” of visitors, which erupts in the Albertina especially on weekends, new chapters of Lichtenstein’s work will open up for him. However, even his best-known early work brings great joy of discovery.