“Lichtenstein
did no more or less for comics than Andy Warhol did for soup”
The comic strip is usually a young person’s unrealized first brush
with fine art in general and abstract art in particular. Although secondary to
the narrative that propels the story line the individual art panels are as
carefully considered, compositionally and stylistically, as any work on a gallery
wall and whilst realistic in nature they use a visual language that is as divorced
from reality as any abstract rendering.
American artist Roy Lichtenstein’s
recognition of this fact along with his adoption of a style derived from
commercial printing saw him become a household name in the Pop Art movement. In
the 1960’s after flirting with Impressionism, cubism and expressionism he
appropriated (stole) comic strip panels that would fit in the palm of your hand
and reproduced them as large scale paintings devoid of their narrative connotations.
As he has said about these works “I was interested in using highly charged material, like Men at War and Love comics,
in a very removed, technical, almost engineering drawing style."
Over the five years that Lichtenstein produced
these works, much to the chagrin of the art world’s high priests of the time, he
cemented himself into the canon of American art history with works that have
become amongst the most distinctly recognizable in the world.
With this style now his trademark Lichtenstein went on to produce a large body of work
not only in painting but sculpture and prints as well. An exhibition of his
prints curated from the 300 held by the Australian National Gallery toured that
country for three years.
Within Lichtenstein’s
body of work there are many appropriations of works that caught his eye from
the annals of history. From Emanuel
Gottlieb Leutze's 1851
painting Washington
Crossing the Delaware to works by modern
masters such as Claude Monet, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Willem
de Kooning Lichtenstein’s rendering is often seen as a parody of
the original. About which he has said "The things that I have apparently
parodied I actually admire."
The Art
institute of Chicago said about Lichtenstein
in their publicity for the 2012 retrospective exhibition of his work “In restating the mass-produced image by means of an
insistently handmade, painterly process, he confounded the notion of the
readymade and forever expanded and altered our understanding of how a painting
can be made, how it should look, and how we define the artist in our society.”
The exhibition Opera Prima at Turin’s Galleria Civica D’Arte Moderna
is showing over 230 examples of Lichtenstein’s
work including drawings and paintings until the 25th of January.
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