Tate Introductions: Lichtenstein E-Book

Nathan Dunne

• Herausgeber: Tate Publishing
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Roy Lichtenstein is one of the best-known and accessible artists of the pop art generation of the 1960s. Taking much of his subject matter from comic strips and popular advertising, Lichtenstein produced large, rigorous and highly stylised paintings such as "Whaam!" and "Drowning Girl". Challenged on the originality of his work, Lichtenstein maintained that its purpose and presentation made it more than just reproduction, and with his characteristic playfulness argued that the purpose of his art was not to be original at all. Lichtenstein's imagery has endured through the decades and is still as iconic as it was fifty years ago, as this fascinating introduction to his life and work proves.This consice book, written by Nathan Dunne, a writer and the editor of Tarkovsky (2008), is the perfect introduction to the life and work of this pop artist and painter.

Leseprobe

Roy Lichtenstein

Nathan Dunne

Contents

Title PageNathan DunneWorks referenced in this textNotesIndexCopyrightAlso available in this series

Nathan Dunne

Cut copy

The charge levelled at Roy Lichtenstein in the Life magazine article, ‘Is He the Worst Artist in the US?’ (1964), was that he was no more than a copyist, ‘that his paintings of blown-up comic strips, cheap ads and reproductions are tedious copies of the banal’.1 His work of the 1960s was so shocking, in terms of its apparent plagiarism and naivety, that Lichtenstein quickly became a central figure of American pop art. Lawrence Alloway has written that a ‘broad definition of Pop art as art about signs seems more useful than the narrow one of art that uses commercial subject matter’.2 While the comic-book paintings remain the most notable of his legacy, they are but a small number of works in an oeuvre that spanned fifty years.

To understand Lichtenstein’s significance, one has to observe the material complexities of his production. While attention to colour was an early occupation, Lichtenstein was ultimately obsessed with form. Despite the starkness of many works, he created a distinctive iconography based on connections between mass culture and the history of art. Rather than being empty duplicates of the original sources, in sampling mustard on bread (Mustard on White 1963, Tate) and Mondrian grids (Non-Objective I 1964, The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Collection, Los Angeles), his work forged a radical ambiguity in which prosaic objects and iconic artworks were reborn. ‘I really don’t think that art can be gross and over-simplified and remain art,’ said Lichtenstein in an interview with John Coplans in 1972, ‘I mean, it must have some subtleties, and it must yield to aesthetic unity, otherwise it’s not art’.3

Drawing by seeing

Roy Fox Lichtenstein was born on 27 October 1923, at the Flower Hospital in New York City. His father, Milton, was a real-estate broker who specialised in managing garages and parking structures. Although there was no obvious artistic precedent in terms of the visual arts, his mother Beatrice was a gifted amateur pianist. Lichtenstein’s fascination with jazz, which began during secondary school at the Franklin School for Boys, where he played piano, clarinet and flute in a small band, was born of his mother’s influence. He also sought out live jazz concerts at Staples on 57th Street, Manhattan, and the Apollo Theater in Harlem. Coinciding with this embrace of jazz, Lichtenstein enrolled in Saturday morning watercolour classes at Parsons School of Design, where he painted still lifes and flower arrangements. These classes encouraged him to paint figurative watercolours of Belgrade Lakes in Maine, where he spent two summers.

After graduating from secondary school he attended Reginald Marsh’s painting class at the Art Students League in New York, where he studied life drawing and Renaissance techniques, such as glazing and underpainting. Marsh espoused a view of art that rejected the European avant-garde art of futurism and cubism, and instead promoted a sentimental realist tradition of depicting American culture: Coney Island in the sun, bourgeois women at the opera, towering cityscapes. Initial attempts by Lichtenstein to assimilate Marsh’s approach to art, with sketches of bright beaches and boxing matches while at the Art Students League, gave way to a frustration at his teacher’s anti-European reflex. He had been captivated by Pablo Picasso since the age of fourteen, after purchasing his first art book, Thomas Craven’s Modern Art: The Men, the Movements,the Meaning (1934), in which he encountered a reproduction of Girl Before a Mirror 1932. Guernica 1937 also made a strong impact on Lichtenstein, when it was shown at The Museum of Modern Art in 1939 to raise funds for refugees of the Spanish Civil War. Admiration for Picasso, whose work would have an impact on Lichtenstein’s later paintings, particularly seen in Femme au Chapeau 1962 (Collection of Martin Z. Margulies, Miami) and Frolic 1977 (Private Collection), was at odds with Marsh’s conservative realism.

In September 1940, with the encouragement of his parents, Lichtenstein left the Art Students League and enrolled in the School of Fine Arts at Ohio State University, one of the few institutions to offer studio degree courses. Here he encountered Hoyt Leon Sherman, an influential teacher who taught a class in drawing based on psychological optics. (Lichtenstein later declared that ‘The ideas of Professor Hoyt Sherman on perception were my earliest important influence’.)4 Students would sit in a pitch-black room as objects and images were flashed onto the wall in quick succession using a tachistoscope. The task, outlined in Sherman’s book Drawing by Seeing (1947), was to draw what had been seen during the brief flash. The flashed objects and images were, initially, easily discernible. However, as the semester progressed, Sherman made the arrangements more complex. He set up three projection screens to vary the depth and thus fragment the image-group.5 Discussing the influence of Sherman’s class, Lichtenstein noted: ‘You’d get a very strong afterimage, a total impression, and then you’d draw it in the dark – the point being that you’d have to sense where the parts were in relation to the whole.’6

Americana and abstract expressionism

Between 1943 and 1945, during the Second World War, Lichtenstein undertook active service in the US Army, and was deployed to France, Belgium and Germany. During infantry training at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, in 1944, he enlarged cartoons by William H. Mauldin for Stars and Stripes, the Army newspaper, an early indication of the process he would explore in the 1960s. After being discharged from duty he returned to Ohio State University, completed his BFA degree under the GI Bill, and began work there as a teacher in the School of Fine Arts. The following years, 1946–1950, were a period of prolific experimentation, during which he produced paintings in the style of Georges Braque, Paul Klee and Picasso, many featuring abstract figures with disproportionate limbs. Few of these works survive. His first group exhibition, in 1948, which included several paintings of this period, was at the Ten Thirty Gallery in Cleveland, Ohio. Here he met gallery assistant Isabel Wilson, whom he married the following year.

In the early 1950s Lichtenstein began to focus on distinctly American subject matter, particularly the frontier, as evident in the works Death of Jane McCrea 1951 and George Washington Crossing the Delaware 1952. The inclination to render aspects of American history was an attempt to make sense of his earlier education at the Art Students League under Reginald Marsh. He also painted several self-portraits as a medieval knight, which were shown together with the frontier paintings at John Heller Gallery, Manhattan, in 1952. The exhibition, although largely unrepresentative of his later career, was important in that one painting on show, Death of the General 1951 (Private Collection), was reproduced in Art Digest, giving Lichtenstein the sense of a wider audience for his work.7 Despite this minor encouragement in the press, however, sales were poor and as a result he struggled to support his young family, which by 1956 included two infant sons. Reprieve came the following year when he accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Art at the State University of New York at Oswego, where he abandoned American-themed work and embraced abstract expressionism, the style then predominant in New York. When the abstract work was shown at Condon Riley Gallery, Manhattan, in 1959, it received little attention and Lichtenstein grew increasingly frustrated.

Growing despondent in his studio, he produced a series of drawings said to be in response to Willem de Kooning’s Woman III 1952–3 (Private Collection), in which a roughly animated figure materialises from a mess of colour.8 Only a few of these drawings remain, including Mickey Mouse I 1958 (Private Collection) and Donald Duck 1958 (Private Collection). In Donald Duck, the Disney character emerges from a roughly sketched background, its hands pressing towards the sides of the paper as though attempting to break free of abstraction. The drawing reveals a tension between abstract expressionism and a more immediate, commercial style. In view of Lichtenstein’s work of the preceding years, such a change in his work may appear unexpected; however the Disney characters, akin to his frontier paintings, are resolutely American. Although initially unconvinced that comic characters could stand alone as art, with the encouragement of artist and art historian Allan Kaprow, whom he met while teaching at Rutgers University, New Jersey, in 1960, Lichtenstein decided to destroy his previous work and pursue comic imagery directly. This newfound style, one that left behind years of erratic experimentation, emerged as the result of Lichtenstein attending several happenings, organised by Kaprow, which included performances by John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg and Charles Olson.9 Kaprow believed that abstract expressionism had brought avant-garde artists to the point where ‘we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space of our everyday life’.10 Thus the unbridled conviction of the happenings inspired Lichtenstein’s own artistic breakthrough. He said of them: ‘Happenings used more whole and more American subject matter than the Abstract Expressionists used’.11