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| “Masterpiece,” Roy Lichtenstein, 1962. Oil on canvas |
We are pleased to welcome a
new critic, Anna-Claire Stinebring, to our group.
Viewing Roy Lichtenstein: A
Retrospective now up at the Art Institute of Chicago through September 3, I
had the distinct sense that Lichtenstein’s art has, in some sense, come full
circle. The AIC has chosen to primarily advertise with the cartoon strip and
ad-inspired paintings (distressed blondes, impossibly serene explosions) that
make “Lichtenstein” and “Pop” seem synonymous, but which are only one subset of
the artist’s prolific career, as a visit to the galleries reveals. This
publicity choice is reasonable – these paintings, all from the 1960s, are
iconic and captivating. But it raises this question: by being inundated with
reproductions of Lichtenstein’s images until they resemble their slick source
material, do we now see Lichtenstein’s paintings through that snazzy consumer
lens? What lesson are we as viewers taking away from the retrospective if,
drawn in by the AIC banners of stunned and stunning women, we take pictures of
his comic strip beauties and make them the wallpaper on our iPhones?
Maybe the simple contours of his
women meet a current desire for simplicity, something vaguely
recession-related. But reproducing Lichtenstein in this way diminishes the
power of the way he’s laboriously and shrewdly reworked these pop-culture
images. This body of work, completed in the 1960s, blew open modern art by
rejecting the premium placed on originality and instead taking advertisements
and comic strip frames as his starting point. Lichtenstein tweaked them and
repainted them on a larger-than-life scale, in a flat, droll style without
commentary. He recreated the comic-book coloring technique of Ben-Day dots by
hand – a laborious undertaking – and worked to conceal his brushstrokes. It’s
important to separate a museum’s publicity department from curatorial, of
course. This fetishizing of the comic book material goes beyond the ad campaign
and museum store. It’s in evidence in the galleries, where, when I visited, a
preponderance of young women in polka-dotted dresses (some even with cat-eye
glasses or cherry-red lipstick) ogled Lichtenstein’s pretty women with their
Ben-Day dot polka-dotted faces.
