Eugene Weekly : 07.27.06

Classical Comix

Lichtenstein exhibit shows Pop art as cultural commentary.

by Sylvie Pederson

Campbell's soup cans and multiple Marilyns? Andy Warhol. Benday dot patterns and comic book imagery? Roy Lichtenstein. Eugene got the Marilyns when the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art reopened in January 2005; now, we get the dots and comics.

Sunrise. Roy Lichtenstein. 1965. Offset lithograph. Collection of the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation.

The "Lichtenstein: Prints 1956-97" exhibit reminds us of the diversity of practices within the art movement that dominated the 1960s. Pop art created such a shift in our perception that critic Arthur Danto called this moment "the end of art" — by which he meant not the end of artistic production, but the end of a specific concept of Western art history.

Warhol embraced the ethos of publicity and consumer culture as well as their images, ultimately turning himself into a self-packaged celebrity. Lichtenstein, on the other hand, seemed immune to the trappings of commercial and popular culture, simply making use of their imagery. What he got out of the symbols of popular culture was a formal vocabulary with which he could explore any subject matter.

"Conceptually," says Dorothy Lichtenstein, the artist's widow, "Roy was more of a classicist, whereas Warhol was more of a romantic."

The nearly 80 lithographs, screen prints, etchings, woodblocks, and mixed-media prints presented at the museum are part of Jordan Schnitzer's personal art collection. They provide a fascinating survey of Lichtenstein's entire Pop period, from his 1956 proto-Pop Ten Dollar Bill (Ten Dollars) lithograph to the serigraph he was working on at the time of his death in 1997.

Lichtenstein pre-Pop: a brief art history

Both Lichtenstein and Warhol went through a pre-Pop career that prepared the ground for their seminal involvement in Pop art. Warhol was a successful commercial artist in New York, while Lichtenstein trained in, and subsequently taught, fine art at Ohio State University, SUNY and Rutgers.

Technically, Lichtenstein's initial art practice included not just painting but every aspect of printmaking — a medium that continued to be crucial in his later Pop art period. Most significantly, he found from the start his subject matter in reproduced images rather than nature, drawing not from life but from already-made and already-coded iconography.

From 1951 to 1956, his sources were the visual clichés of American myths and history: the cowboys and pioneers of the frontier and the American Indian. In this Americana series, he transposed reproductions of naïve historic scenes found in books and magazines into a modernist idiom derived from Picasso's Cubism and from Paul Klee — effectively highlighting the separation of content and form.

In 1957, Lichtenstein left Cleveland for a position at SUNY Oswego. The next three years were his brief period of abstract expressionist painting. Around 1958, he incorporated cartoon characters, done in a loose, expressive manner, among the otherwise abstract gestural marks. This had been done before — by Picasso, Kurt Schwitters, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns among others.

In 1960, Lichtenstein started teaching at Rutgers, which brought him in contact with Allan Kaprow and Claes Oldenburg closer to the New York scene. Drawing comic images from bubble-gum wrappers for his children, it occurred to him, one April day of 1961, to turn one into a large canvas, "just to see what it would look like." This became Look Mickey, his first Pop painting.

The Beginnings of Pop art

The earlier manifestations of Pop art took place in 1950s London, with Richard Hamilton and the other members of the Independent Group of young artists who subscribed to the Dadaist notion of challenging art's elevated status. But what they extolled in place of high art was the popular culture produced in the USA — as in Hamilton's collage, Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?, considered the first work of Pop art.

Lighting Bolt Banner. Roy Lichtenstein. 1966. Felt. Collection of the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation.

Meanwhile, the 1950s American art scene was dominated by Abstract Expressionism, especially in New York. By the mid-50s, however, a number of artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg had begun incorporating elements of mass-culture in their works, thus paving the way for Pop art. There was a revival of interest in the Dada movement and in Marcel Duchamp's work. With their irreverence for tradition, the Neo-Dadaists celebrated ordinary reality, pop culture, and use of mixed media, non-art materials, and American iconography. Painter and performance art ("Happenings") pioneer Allan Kaprow, who would become a close friend of Lichtenstein, claimed in a 1958 manifesto that "objects of every sort are materials for the new art." A major shift in aesthetic sensibilities was underway. This would manifest itself through a number of new approaches to art, with Pop art the most decisive and visible.

Classic Pop art emerged in New York in 1960. That year, James Rosenquist painted President Elect (a juxtaposition of JFK's face with commercial images of an automobile and a slice of cake) in the style of the billboards he painted to support himself. That year too, Andy Warhol, taking his cue from Rauschenberg and Johns, started borrowing imagery from newspapers and magazines, turning consumer ads, Coca-Cola and, yes, cartoon-strip characters (Superman, Popeye, Dick Tracy), into subject-matter for large paintings. The latter became part of a department store window display in April 1961.

In summer 1961, Lichtenstein produced Look Mickey, generally identified as his first Pop painting.

Soon after, the influential dealer Leo Castelli agreed to represent Lichtenstein. When Warhol subsequently showed his own work to Castelli, the latter declined to take him on because he already had similarly-inspired paintings by Lichtenstein. The comic-strip-imagery slot being taken, Warhol developed in 1962 the silkscreen technique with which he has become associated. (Castelli did take on Warhol in 1964, after the latter had gained recognition from his Ferus Gallery shows in Los Angeles.)

Lichtenstein, Warhol, Rosenquist, Claes Oldenburg, Tom Wesselmann and the other artists that came under the label of Pop art held in common that the imagery, products and ethos of mass-consumerism constituted a fitting subject-matter. A Neo-Dadaist rejection of artistic style led to an embrace of the mass-produced look — which each artist promptly turned into an individual signature style.

From Mickey to high art

Lichtenstein's Pop vocabulary, quickly developed, proved adaptable to a vast range of iconographies, themes, styles and quotations from other artists' works as well as his own.

That vocabulary consisted of bold black outlines, fields of blown-up Benday dots alternating with solid colors reduced to four (the three primaries plus green), simplification and flatness. Lichtenstein eliminated superfluous detail and, painstakingly, erased traces from his hand to create the appearance of mechanical reproduction.

Lichtenstein tended to work in sets and series, and the pieces at the JSMA are loosely grouped accordingly, with close to two dozens series represented. One missing group is that of Lichtenstein's early renderings of single objects as depicted in drawings for advertisements and catalogues. Unlike Warhol's images of commercial products, with their prominent brand names, Lichtenstein's were anonymous. This pointed out a subtle constant in Lichtenstein's work: the aim for the generic — generic human figures derived from romance and war comic-books, life-size generic Interiors inspired from tiny ads cut out from a phone book in Rome — which he described as "bland" and "inhuman."

Lichtenstein extracted the elements common to a category of objects and eliminated their particularities. Because his subject-matter consisted solely of prior representations, his works present us with our own cultural clichés and codes, further reduced to their most generic.

This distillation of the generic image from popular iconography guided the development of his Pop idiom. Fascinated by the visual codes and symbols of popular culture and commercial art, he borrowed the formal tools of low-cost printing techniques, comic books and advertisements and adapted them. Lichtenstein never copied. He always tweaked and manipulated, discreetly, on the sly, but alter he did. His comic-book based paintings and prints were not enlargements of pre-existing images but of drawings he created, based upon found materials.

The result was twofold. First, by depersonalizing comic-book imagery into generics with no recognizable source, he created a style of his own. Secondly, his formal and compositional adjustments turned mundane communication into fine art with wit, irony and playfulness.

Within a couple of years, he began applying his process to varied subject matters far beyond comic book imagery and advertisements.

In Sunrise, he distills and amplifies the conventional representation of sun rays. Similarly, his Pyramids are reduced to simple pictographs. In American Indian Theme Series, he reworked stereotypes of Native American iconography into something his own.

Peace Through Chemistry II. Roy Lichtenstein. 1970. Lithograph and screenprint.Collection of the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation.

Always aware of art history, Lichtenstein took the synthesis of the formal and pictorial elements of other painters' works as a formal challenge.

Of Brushstrokes, an obvious reference to Abstract Expressionism, he said: "I was very interested in characterizing or caricaturing a brush stroke. The very nature of a brush stroke is anathema to outlining and filling in as used in cartoons. So I developed a form for it which is what I am trying to do in the explosions, airplanes, and people — that is, to get a standardized thing — a stamp or image."

In his Cathedral and Haystack Series, his Benday dots replace Monet's Impressionist brushstrokes. His Bull Profile Series lays bare his creative process, reducing by stages a conventional image of a bull into Constructivist abstractions. His Mao is a salute to Warhol, while in Surrealist Series: Blonde, he quotes himself as well as Dali. Picasso was always a foremost influence, and Lichtenstein returned to him in various works, including the exhibit's Modern Art II and Cubist Cello. "I think Picasso the best artist of this century," Lichtenstein said, "but it is interesting to do an oversimplified Picasso — to misconstrue the meaning of his shapes and still produce art."

WHAAM! Poster, edition of 1450. Roy Lichtenstein. 1967. Offset lithograph. Collection of the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation.

Lichtenstein delighted in quoting and reflecting modern art within his own prints. His Interiors contain almost obligatory modern paintings and sculptures, though in his signature generic representation. Similarly, the Paintings Series are paintings of paintings on walls. The Reflections Series are representations of light's reflections on representations of framed Lichtensteins.

Humor and tension result from the quoting of the styles of high art with radically Pop language.

Lichtenstein remained committed to a formalist conception of the painter's craft, in which the artist organizes his canvas according to his highly-developed sense of form. He did not delegate the creation of his works to assistants. He controlled every detail from conception to the final production of prints. "I don't think you can do a work of art and not really be involved in it."

Get involved in the "Roy Lichtenstein: Prints 1956-1997" exhibit until August 27 at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art on the UO campus.

An Interview with Dorothy Lichtenstein

In 1962, Dorothy Herzka, a young graduate in art history and political science, became the director of the Paul Bianchini gallery in New York. The owner's tastes were fairly conservative, but Herzka brought in more contemporary art. It was in 1964, when the gallery organized the Great American Supermarket, that Herzka met her future husband, Roy Lichtenstein. "I thought it'd be so clever if we could get Warhol and Roy to design a shopping bag each," she explains. They did, and Lichtenstein's screenprinted Turkey Shopping Bag is part of the JSMA exhibit.

Herzka married Lichtenstein in 1968 and remained active in the New York contemporary art scene. She worked with the surrealist artist William Copley, editing and publishing S.M.S. (Shit Must Stop), a series of portfolios of 73 artists' works published by The Letter Edged in Black Press. It included pieces by Marcel Duchamp, Lichtenstein, John Cage, and Yoko Ono. "It was the 60s, when everything was equal," says Dorothy Lichtenstein. "Every artist got paid $100 for their contribution, no matter who or what."

Kitty Piercy welcomes Dorothy Lichtenstein to Eugene.

"I've been with Roy throughout his second career. After we married, we moved to Southampton, Long Island, where I'm still living now. There is a long history of artists living here. Being surrounded by water, it has exquisite light — and it's close to New York City."

Lichtenstein is now President of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation and an Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

The 1960s

"The early 60s were a turning point for so many different things. It was an incredible time, so innocent and optimistic, a time of enormous change, though today it doesn't seem to have ever happened. The whole mindset of a generation seemed to change. This country had been incredibly conservative in the 50s and there was a huge cultural shift that probably really started in 1964. Roy was very much a part of it, and he and I had a common world view –almost everyone seemed to share it at the time. There was an expectation that society would become fairer."

"When Roy started at Rutgers in 1960, [Allan] Kaprow taught there too. [George] Segal was getting his MFA there, the Fluxus people were around. Rutgers was very connected to New York City and there was a vibrant scene with Happenings and lots of parties where people met. But there were no intense discussions among the Pop artists – they didn't really exchange ideas the way the Abstract Expressionists did."

The man & the artist

"Roy was shy and reserved. He'd joke he'd take curmudgeon lessons but he was always nice and thoughtful, and treated everyone with great dignity. He had a very wry sense of humor and irony (he planned to leave his soul to science) but since he was shy you had to know him for a while for it to come through. He loved music, Bach and bebop especially, played the flute by ear. I bought him a saxophone for his 70^th birthday, and he began to read music."

"He was a very regular worker, and was pretty much in his studio seven days a week. I suppose he was very much a 'we'-person, because I felt part and parcel of his life in the studio."

"When painting, Roy was always thinking about form. He invented a rotating easel to turn his canvas upside down and frequently worked with a mirror because form was not to be dictated by the subject-matter. He was very much a formalist in that sense."

The JSMA exhibit

On June 15, Lichtenstein was the guest of honor at the opening:

"I was surprised at how good an overview this is. Jordan is constantly trying to fill in the blanks, he's still collecting, but it's already pretty extensive and comprehensive. He even has an early announcement for Roy's 1962 show at Castelli that he framed. And I was bowled over to see Roy's Turkey Shopping Bag hanging out there. Jordan does that with all the artists he collects. It's wonderful when someone can show the range of an artist in this way and bring the work to various places."