n° 368 - January 2015
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Much More than a Comic
A journey through Roy Lichtenstein’s Pop Art at Turin’s GAM
Contemporary man is constantly surrounded – and at times steamrolled
– by images; modern technologies
permit immortalising and reproducing any fragment of life, making each
unforgettable, frozen in time – but
also a simple drop in an ocean of indistinguishable drops.
The image has always been used to
preserve memory, initially the memory of the world of spirituality and
power; it gradually became a common heritage and then what it is
today, a mass consumption commodity found everywhere: in product logos, news, ads and media in general.
By the 1950s, a strong change in the
value of the image – and consequently,
of art – was perceivable, first in the
U.K. and then – and above all – in
the U.S., where the phenomenon denominated Pop Art got its start. It
began as a repudiation of the excessive intellectualism of Abstract Expressionism; it drew its strength from
common ‘wares’ available to everyone at any time: advertising, comics,
news, all types of everyday products,
from soup to laundry soap. The term
‘Pop Art’ derives from the word ‘popular’ in its sense not of ‘trendy’ but of
‘mass’. Pop Art did not seek to provoke, as had Dada, nor to communicate a social message; it did not aim
to stimulate rebellion of any kind.
More than anything, it was the reflection of a changing world, of new production methods, of the rise of a new
consumer society, of an age in which
any object whatsoever can be (re)produced in series – all without critical
or alarmist intent. Rather than to abstract from the new reality, it instead
tried to include it in the world of
art and by doing so created new categories, new forms of availability: art
must keep in step with the times and
become a mass phenomenon, no longer
an enjoyment for a few but the narration of the stories of everyone, from
the labourer to the rich industrialist,
from the seamstress to the high-fashion stylist. Independently of each
other, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy
Warhol launched Pop Art in the U.S.,
drawing inspiration from tabloid cartoons and advertising. From characters loved by comic-strip readers,
Mickey Mouse and Popeye became
works of art; the very titles of Lichtenstein’s creations sound ‘comic’ – or
better, onomatopoeic: Takka takka,
Varoom, Crak, Whaam! – and it seems
that the canvas itself is shouting them.
This new art encountered strong opposition, since it seemed almost to
provoke, to critique the emotional
depth of the Abstract Expressionists’
canvases: the more traditional critics, who had barely had time to digest the novelties of Pollock’s drippings, did not appreciate this emerging trend in artistic production and
did not hide their disappointment.
A 1964 Life magazine article on Lichtenstein was titled ‘Is he the worst
artist in America?’. The borderline
between art and design became very
thin as Pop Art advanced – and criticism pulled out all the stops; for example, it formally charged ‘banality’.
This was by no means the first time
the art world had pilfered from mass
culture, but until that time this tactic been employed to temper overlyserious contents with spunky low
notes; Pop Art, on the other hand,
seemed to do the opposite and make
the commonplace object the undisputed protagonist. Lichtenstein was
accused of blatantly copying the comics
and therefore of lack of originality.
Nothing could be less true, however,
since his ‘copying’ was a complicated
process. The artist carefully selected
one or more panels from a comic strip
and made sketches which he then
Study for Pop! - Marsha and Jeffrey Perelman
Collection
© Estate of Roy Lichtenstein / SIAE 2014
page 2
Still Life with Mirror (Study) - Private collection
Oh, Jeff...I Love You, Too...But... (Study) - Private collection
© Estate of Roy Lichtenstein / SIAE 2014
© Estate of Roy Lichtenstein / SIAE 2014
transferred to canvas without ever reproducing the strip or the panel as a
whole; after tracing the image on the
canvas and adapting it to the picture
plane, he filled it in by stencilling on
dots in primary colours and added
heavy outlines to give prominence to
the figures; he began painting from
the light ground and then went on to
the black outlines. Despite appearing to be simple reproduction of normal comics, his work was actually a
study and an accurate union of mechanical reproduction and handwork
– and it is indeed difficult to distinguish the two. Perhaps Lichtenstein’s
technique should be considered the
cry of a man who felt oppressed by
the modern technologies and who attempted to imitate them, first placing himself on their level and then
improving on them. The artist took
an interest in studies of visual perception throughout his career; he
‘poached’ the Ben Day dot from industrial typography and made it his
highly original signature; he did not
use his dots as in Pointillism, to create a homogeneous appearance at a
certain distance, but rather used a typographic overlay of exaggerated dimensions to convey the idea of a print.
The inventor of the Ben Day Rapid
Shading Mediums was Benjamin Day,
who by 1878 had excogitated an ‘industrial’ application for the optical
principles formulated by the 19thcentury colour theorists. But the sensational, innovative character of the
Lichtenstein dots derives from the interpretation of reality they convey: a
sense of radical change, that life itself
was mediated, ‘screened’, by the appalling bulk of printed and transmitted images.
Liechtenstein once ironically commented, ‘In almost half a century of
career I painted comics and dots for
only two years. Is it possible that no
one has ever noticed that I have done
nothing else?’; and indeed, to see
Lichtenstein’s entire oeuvre solely as
a collection of dots poses a serious
limit to understanding his work. To
overcome this obstacle, from 27 September 2014 until 25 January 2015,
Turin’s Gallery of Modern Art (GAM)
is hosting a total of 235 works by Roy
page 3
Lichtenstein which illustrate how he
adopted and evolved the Ben Day
technique over the course of his creative life, drawings from the early
Forties to 1997, several large works
and documentation in the form of a
photo exhibit of the artist at work.
The exhibition, curated by Danilo
Eccher, Director of GAM Turin, centres on Lichtenstein’s Opera Prima
(First Work); that is, the origins of
his work, his sources of inspiration,
his sketches and studies – and only
then moves on to the finished paintings.
The works on show reveal the world
of fantasy and dreams latent in Lichtenstein’s canvases – as in those of Miró
and Dalí, from whom the artist seems
to draw inspiration in certain of his
drawings: eyes in a cloud or in an ear,
figures broken up, not only in the
terms of technique, which makes use
of lines and dashes more than dots,
but also physically: mouths placed
vertically and objects endowed with
unbelievable malleability and fluidity suggest that Lichtenstein intends
to compose rebuses with his figures;
at the origin of his work we thus see
references to Surrealism and Dada,
albeit more for study and research
than for social reasons; he explores
the forms but ignores the messages;
his is pure creation.
It is easy to yield to the temptation
to consider Lichtenstein a mere imitator. But he was much more: far
from simply imitating, his art draws
inspiration from the visual world
shared by the masses and proceeds on
to something higher, to true artistic
representation of subjects considered
‘banal’, succeeding in elevating them
towards pure abstraction. Often, contemporary art presents figures which
dissolve into the background to abolish depth and make surfaces completely flat. Lichtenstein, like the
other Pop artists, instead gives us the
illusion of space and the de facto reality of the surface, as though the
comic-strip characters had usurped
the metaphysical space of Malevich’s
geometric figures.
Before landing on the shores of Pop
Art, Lichtenstein experimented with
an Expressionist style, then with a
faux folk style to which he adapted
American themes and, for a short time,
with abstract compositions. He mastered, without difficulty, a series of
devices of the modernist schools and
the artifices of the avant-gardes, such
as the gestural brushstroke for laying
on a shadow or a white spot for a reflection, the abstract forms of the grid,
monochrome painting, ready-made,
the found image. All held together,
in his works, by the subjects inspired
by advertisements and comics, by that
figurative mode which avant-garde
art had attempted to overthrow.
In 1967 he stated, ‘I don’t draw a picture to reproduce it – I do it in order
to recompose it. Nor am I trying to
change it as much as possible. I try to
make the minimum amount of change
. . .’ And here is the kernel of Lichtenstein’s creative approach: to replicate printed images but adapt them
to pictorial parameters. Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian and Léger are all present in his canvases, read through
comics: the ambiguity of Picasso’s
light and shadow, Mondrian’s primary colours, Léger’s semi-caricatural figures, Matisse’s marked, suave
contour. A propos of his own pictorial language, Lichtenstein once remarked, ‘Mine is linked to Cubism
to the extent that cartooning is. There
is a relationship between cartooning
and people like Miró and Picasso which
may not be understood by the cartoonist, but it definitely is related
even in the early Disney’.
Enquiry into Lichtenstein’s Opera
Prima is essential to understanding
the artist’s development, what led
him to make certain choices and how
he breathed life into what we might
call a democratisation of art – which
continues yet today.
elena aiazzi
Study of Hands - Private collection
© Estate of Roy Lichtenstein / SIAE 2014