It’s the 100th Anniversary of Pop Artist Roy Lichtenstein’s Birth

Pre-Pop artwork, 1948–1960

Throughout his years in Ohio, upstate New York, and New Jersey, Lichtenstein regularly exhibited in galleries and juried exhibitions. Beginning in 1952, he was represented by the John Heller Gallery in New York, where he presented several solo shows before leaving the gallery in 1958.

Rembrandt, Daumier, and Picasso were among the artists Lichtenstein most admired, with the latter having a significant impact on his early efforts well into the 1950s. His output during this time was eclectic in both style and subject, with Lichtenstein returning again and again to the Spaniard’s career for inspiration. A study titled Reclining Woman (1942) looks like it could have come out of Picasso’s Blue or Rose period, except that its overall palette was green. A portrait made the following year, Charles Batterman, is basically an homage to Picasso’s Portrait of Gertrude Stein (1906). Picassoid surrealism, along with touches of Klee and Miró, were staples of Lichtenstein’s practice throughout the 1940s, evident in dozens of paintings and works on paper such as The Musician and Battle Scene (both c. 1948).

During the early 1950s, Lichtenstein produced several thematically diverse bodies of work based on historical subject matter. These included forays into Persian miniatures, medieval fantasias, and scenes from the Old West featuring cowboys and Native Americans, which were, once more, indebted to Picasso. One example from 1952, Two Sioux Indians, goes so far as to appear to attire one of its titular figures in Picasso’s signature blue-and-white-striped marinière. One can well wonder what Lichtenstein was up to with this eclectic grab bag of motifs, but perhaps they had one thing in common, which was that they seemed to be mined from the popular imagination, if not pop culture directly. While it might be too much to suggest a straight line between them and the appropriations that made Lichtenstein famous, they may have pointed in that direction.

Lichtenstein took up abstraction in the late 1950s, well past the point at which Abstract Expressionism had lost its hold on New York’s art world. Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg had both emerged with their respective demolitions of AbEx tropes. In any case, Lichtenstein’s approach could largely be described as colorist. For one series, he dipped the edges of a towel in paint, draped it over his arm, and dragged it across the canvas, creating squeegee effects that anticipated Gerhard Richter’s by a generation. But he also began to bury images of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck within flurries of marks, both in paintings and drawings, though only a few of the latter have survived. These proved to be the final stepping stone to the work for which he is known.

Lead-up to Pop Art

Why did Lichtenstein choose to go in the direction of Pop Art as the 1950s were drawing to a close? One could point to certain biographical details as harbingers. While in the service, for instance, Lichtenstein’s commanding officer tasked him to enlarge Bill Maudlin’s Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoons of battle-hardened G.I.s that regularly ran in the military newspaper Stars and Stripes (the exact reasons for which are obscure). Years later, Lichtenstein used a projector to create a mural of Mickey Mouse for his son’s bedroom.

Lichtenstein himself cited the influence of one of his professors at OSU, Hoyt Sherman. Sherman taught drawing using a method in which students sitting in a dark space were exposed to images of abstract shapes that were briefly illuminated by a strobe light; they were then directed to render the resulting afterimage each was experiencing at that moment. Lichtenstein credited Hoyt’s “flash labs,” as they were called, with showing him a whole new way of seeing.

But undoubtedly the biggest factor in Lichtenstein’s turn towards Pop Art was simply that the idea was in the air at the end of the 1950s. Specifically, Johns and Rauschenberg had revived Marcel Duchamp’s “readymade” strategy—in which common manufactured objects (a bicycle wheel, a urinal, a rack for drying bottles) were rechristened as art—and in doing so opened up popular culture as a source for subjects. Johns and Rauschenberg applied Duchampian aesthetics to paintings and sculptures, with Johns in particular imposing them on the formulation of his imagery by limning targets and flags. The table for Pop Art, then, had been well set by the time Lichtenstein adopted it.

1961

The year John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as president proved pivotal to the development of Pop Art and Lichtenstein’s emergence as a genre stalwart. (Indeed, Kennedy’s youthful vigor undoubtedly contributed to the zeitgeist that produced Pop.) Like Warhol, Lichtenstein drew upon ads in newspapers and catalogs, producing compositions of common items such as the eponymous Black Flowers, Roto Broil, and Step-on Can with Leg, the latter a before-and-after diptych of its subject closed and opened.

Then, of course, there were the paintings and drawings taken from comic books: Look Mickey, featuring Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse fishing from a pier, with the latter laughing as the former unknowingly hooks his own behind; Popeye, a scene of the spinach-loving sailor decking his nemesis, Bluto; and I Can See the Whole Room! . . . And There’s Nobody in It!, with its closeup of a man at a peephole.

With the help of his Rutgers colleague Allan Kaprow, Lichtenstein found his way to the Leo Castelli Gallery, where he made his Pop Art debut in a group exhibition during the fall of 1961. (His contribution, Girl with Ball, depicted an exuberant young woman at the beach.) Castelli, who represented Rauschenberg and Johns, among others, had established himself as the go-to dealer for Pop Art, and he quickly began selling Lichtenstein’s paintings. Pushing 40, Lichtenstein became an “overnight” sensation after nearly 20 years of work.

The Ben Day dot

Although people use the terms interchangeably, halftone dots and Ben Day dots are actually different. While both enable the mass reproduction of images and rely on optical illusion to do so, the former simulates gradations in tone through dots that vary in size and spacing, while the latter, invented in 1879 by namesake Benjamin Henry Day Jr., are of equal size and distribution and are usually used to print patches of color. Lichtenstein reprised both methods by stenciling dots through perforated pieces of sheet metal or bits of window screen and by scumbling the canvas with nearly dry brushes to generate dotlike textures. He also referenced another halftone process that substituted lines for dots.

Lichtenstein painted his canvases with combinations of oil and an acrylic resin soluble in turpentine and mineral spirits called Magna, which produced smooth matte surfaces that perfectly mimicked the look of comics. Lichtenstein was so attached to Magna that when its original manufacturer went out of business, he persuaded another company to start making a similar product.

Love and war

Even as a Pop artist, Lichtenstein displayed the same penchant for eclectic subject matter that characterized his early career. However, his most famous works were a group based on romance- and war-themed comic books, the most significant of which were Drowning Girl and Whaam! (both 1963).

Drowning Girl was a detail taken from issue #83 of Secret Hearts, published in 1962, and portrays the head of a teary-eyed woman about to be subsumed by a wave; a thought balloon above her proclaims, “I don’t care! I’d rather sink — than call Brad for help!” Lichtenstein made changes to the text and introduced elements borrowed from Jean Arp and Joan Miró, and more specifically the central motif from Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa (1831). Drowning Girl was one of several paintings involving distressed damsels, which may have been related to Lichtenstein’s divorce from Isabel in 1965. But more broadly, Lichtenstein was parodying the mid-century media’s depiction of women.

Similarly, Whaam! sent up Cold War militarism with its scene of an American fighter plane blowing up an enemy aircraft. Taken from a comic called All-American Men of War, Whaam! was originally meant for a single canvas until Lichtenstein decided to divide it into a diptych, with each aircraft given its own panel. The scale of the texts shifts markedly, with the American pilot on the left providing narration (“I pressed the fire control . . . and ahead of me rockets blazed through the sky . . . ”) in much smaller print than the eponymous sound effect on the right emblazoned across a stylized explosion. Together they create a kind of call and response between cause and effect or thought and action.

Later career

Paintings like Whaam! and Drowning Girl represent something of an apogee in Lichtenstein’s sourcing from comic books, and indeed, by the end of the 1960s his focus on them gave way to other interests, though comics would continue to make appearances in his later work.

At the start of the 1960s Lichtenstein began to develop a comic book–derived style that would go on to serve him over the entire span of his practice as he explored a wide range of subjects in all genres, including portraiture, figure studies, still life, and landscape. Basically he incorporated bold black outlines, areas of bright, flat colors, and Ben-Day dot patterns to render themes largely related to the history of art, architecture, and design. This approach proved to be as codified and consistent as Egyptian tomb painting, marking a viewpoint that was as essentialist as it was traditionalist. Whatever it depicted, a painting by Lichtenstein could not be confused with anything else.

At times Lichtenstein created straight-up appropriations of art-historical masterpieces, such as a 1968–69 series based on Monet’s paintings of Rouen’s cathedral. More frequently, though, he resorted to generalized evocations of styles, periods, and genres, including Cubism, Expressionism Art Deco, Chinese landscapes, ancient Greek classicism, and, of course, paeans to Picasso. Objects—mirrors, details of Beaux-Arts decor, and cartoonish blown-up brushstrokes—were accorded similar treatment. Lichtenstein also undertook printmaking and sculpture, the latter fashioned as flat, freestanding cutouts that sometimes reached monumental proportions.

Legacy

As mentioned previously, while Warhol redefined what it meant to be an artist, Lichtenstein’s work also had a lasting impact. A visit by a young Gerhard Richter to Lichtenstein’s 1963 solo exhibition in Paris helped to galvanize the Capitalist Realist movement in Germany, and pretty much any artist using cartoons or cartoonlike imagery since Lichtenstein owes him a debt.

Lichtenstein’s most famous paintings channeled the moment when American mid-century optimism began to curdle into something much darker and more sinister, though his work didn’t follow suit. Instead he found solace in the constancy of art history and, in doing so, carved himself a place within it.