In the first major exhibition since Roy Lichtenstein's death in 1997, some 130 of the artist's greatest paintings from all periods of his career are being presented along with a selection of related drawings and sculptures at the National Art Gallery in Washington. When the show was in Chicago last summer, Anna-Claire Stinebring reviewed it for Critics at Large.
Masters of Surface: Roy Lichtenstein in Chicago, Mad Men on TV
 |
| “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.
