When an artist has a monumental idea, does it go off in his head with a “POW!” or a “CRAK!”?
In the case of Pop Art pioneer Roy Lichtenstein, whose name and style are synonymous with “POW!” and “CRAK!”-not to speak of “WHAAM!”-the concept of his now-famous comic-art paintings and prints didn’t come to him explosively at all.
His work, among the most instantly recognized in the world, is the subject of a dazzling, just-opened, two-floor retrospective exhibition, “The Prints of Roy Lichtenstein,” on view through early January at the National Gallery of Art.
But when the inspiration for his highly linear, shaded-with-half-tone-dots creations came to him in the early 1960s, he had no notion of its being art at all-let alone a major component of the “Pop Art” phenomenon.
He was a little-known assistant professor of art at New Jersey’s Douglass College, the women’s division of Rutgers University, trudging his way through routine abstract expressionism. Lichtenstein now says he felt a bit trapped at the time.
“I guess I must have realized, though I don’t remember saying this to myself in any way, `You’re awfully late, you know. This is about the eighth generation of abstract expressionists.’ I guess I was looking for some kind of way out.” He had done a number of fanciful cubist abstract renderings; a much-praised, fractionated $10 bill; a charming, childlike saga of St. George and the Dragon; a Dubuffet-like series on American Indians. He was toying with similar transmutations of Walt Disney characters.
“I was working from a very small cartoon I had in my hand. I was doing abstract expressionist versions of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, you know. Recognizable, but not very. Suddenly, for some reason-probably all the influences you can think of-I thought, `Why not paint a picture of this, just as it is?’ And that was the very first one, `Look, Mickey.’
“I was sort of trying it out, really. I put it up in my studio, and after that I could never really paint an abstract painting again. The paintings I did from then on were Pop Art.”
National Gallery Director Rusty Powell honors the 71-year-old Lichtenstein as “this most distinguished American artist,” and tosses off terms like “stunning” to describe such works as “Reverie,” Lichtenstein’s comic-art version of a wistful blond 1940s torch singer warbling a refrain from “Stardust.”
Ruth Fine, the Gallery’s curator of modern prints and drawings and organizer of this show, calls Lichtenstein “a master,” especially at incorporating the styles of artists from generations past in what at first glance seem simple, two-dimensional contemporary graphics.
“There’s a totally seamless sensibility at work,” she says. “Roy’s work is a textbook of art history seen through the eyes of one person, because the layering of references is so extraordinary. There’s this constant reverberation that only builds and reveals itself in looking again and again. I’ve been five years working with this material (for the exhibition), but seeing it all on the wall at once continues to be revealing to me.”
One of the centerpieces of the show is “CRAK!” The 1964 print shows a young French woman, a World War II underground fighter, firing a rifle in a percussive deadly burst and shouting, “Now, Mes Petits, Pour La France!”
The woman’s face is serious but innocent. Her hands are manicured and very feminine. Her dark hair falls over her face in childish bangs. Her beret speaks more of chic than militancy. Yet Lichtenstein is presenting this endearing mademoiselle in the act of killing-for a political idea.
“There’s so much intelligence there,” says Greta Levart of Hartsdale, N.Y., who bought “CRAK!” when she was a student at Ohio State University (where Lichtenstein also taught and studied) and loaned it to the National Gallery for the show. “The wit and irony. And the phenomenal knowledge of art history. That’s why Lichtenstein has no real competitors working in his style.”
But when he made the sharp career turn to this “stylistic opposite of abstract expressionism” and began to paint and print comic-art images, he had no expectation that his newfound “school of one” would succeed, or even be accepted as art.
“I thought there were probably two galleries in the world who would take them-the (now-defunct) Green Gallery and (the Leo) Castelli,” Lichtenstein says. “They already had (Robert) Rauschenberg and (Jasper) Johns and (Frank) Stella and (Cy) Twombly.
“In those days I used to go around with work on top of my station wagon and just bring it-you know, `OK, look at it.’ They told me to leave the work. Leo liked it but wasn’t quite sure this was something he wanted to commit himself to.
“When I came back about three weeks later, they also had Andy’s (Warhol) work and (James) Rosenquist’s. I was shocked to see Andy’s because he had done (cartoon art) of Nancy and Dick Tracy. I had other cartoon work somewhat similar. It was amazing. I had no idea they were doing that, considering the completely different places that we came from. Then Leo realized there was such a thing as Pop.”
Every piece Lichtenstein provided Castelli was sold even before the gallery held its first Pop Art show in February 1962.
“Of course, the most expensive thing of mine was $800,” Lichtenstein says.
Many of his most famous prints initially were done as handouts and mementos advertising the Leo Castelli Gallery. First given away, then sold for $5 or $10, they’re now worth many thousands of dollars. His paintings also have increased tremendously in value. One, “I . . . I’m Sorry,” sold for $2.5 million at a Nov. 1 auction at Sotheby’s in New York.
The 90-piece National Gallery print show, which also includes several sculptures, reflects the full range of Lichtenstein’s explorations. His philosophy of Pop Art reaches far beyond the comic book page.
For example, his 1965 “Moonscape,” with a screen print of a moon and black- and red-dotted clouds overlaying a three-dimensional metallic susbstance called Rowlux, hypnotically reminds one of 19th Century American painter Albert Pinkham Ryder. Two of his most famous efforts, the 1969 “Haystack Series” and “Cathedral Series,” are inventive print Pop Art versions of two of Claude Monet’s most prized works. In a seven-part series called “Bull Profile,” he reduces and translates an amiable representational image of the king of farm animals into a geometric essence.
“Still Life With Lobster” (1974) is certainly informed by Picasso’s large outpouring of similar works. Lichtenstein’s 1975 abstract print “Homage to Max Ernst” is similarly derived, and two stark 1980 prints, “Reclining Nude” and “Dr. Waldmann,” scream of 1930s German expressionism.
In an ultimate irony, he has taken the most spontaneous of creative actions-the painter’s brushstroke-and rendered it as a piece of sculpture/furniture, his madcap “Brushstroke Chair.”
Lichtenstein is a dedicated liberal who often has turned his art to political purpose. The show includes such examples as his 1989 homage to Bobby Kennedy, his troubling anti-gun print “The Gun in America,” his perhaps too mysterious peekaboo-blond campaign poster “Dukakis 88!” and “The Oval Office” (1992), a White House interior intended as an homage to Bill Clinton but an image surprisingly benign, considering it was completed at a time when Clinton represented a massive outpouring of populist sentiment.
Lichtenstein was born in New York City in 1923 and studied briefly with Reginald Marsh at the Art Students League, but-with a long interruption for Army service in Europe during World War II-got his graduate and undergraduate degrees in art from Ohio State.
“I wanted to study art,” he says. “My folks wanted me to have a degree. There weren’t many colleges at the time that gave degrees in studio art. So I liked the idea of going out of New York and seeing something
else. I don’t think I derived anything from the Midwest particularly, except maybe Pop qualities. You kind of make your own circle in these places. It almost doesn’t make much difference where you go.”
In 1949, while teaching art at Ohio State, he married Isabel Wilson; they divorced in 1965. The couple had two children: David Hoyt, now an electrical engineer and computer programmer in San Francisco, and Mitchell Wilson, an actor who starred in the recent film “The Wedding Banquet.” Lichtenstein married his current wife, Dorothy, 25 years ago when she was an art gallery director.
Though he’s often in New York City visiting with friends, Lichtenstein lives in Southhampton on Long Island, where he works “every day.”
His newest thing is Pop Art paintings and prints of nudes, two of which are in the show (others are at the Richard Gray Gallery, 620 N. Michigan Ave., in Chicago). Does he work from live models?
“No,” he says. “From cartoons, of the ’60s, that are dressed, usually.”
