Lichtenstein: An Appreciation

Among consumers of art history, there is no one more hungry than the artist, no one more able to incorporate or cannibalize it, change it and start new histories, contradict, subvert, and even destroy it.

At the same time, there is no one more reverential in its presence or more able to enrich it. This is the legacy, in all its full intellectual power, that Roy Lichtenstein has emblazoned and enlarged.

He died on Sept. 29 - too young, at 73 - in the same year, ironically, as Willem de Kooning, giants of our time at opposite ends of the art pole.

The Comic Strip Image

It was Lichtenstein who, with his 1962 introduction of Pop Art and the comic strip image in his first exhibit at the Leo Castelli Gallery, almost single-handedly eclipsed the Abstract Expressionist culture.

Like de Kooning in East Hampton, he was an East End artist, with his studio and house in Southampton. But he was a total contrast to de Kooning in his view and practice.

He was among the first of the university artists, products of the G.I. bill, which gave returning veterans of World War II a free college education. Just as the Works Progress Administration had brought artists together in the '30s and '40s to forge a new American art identity, so the G.I. bill empowered universities to produce career artists in fields formerly fueled by passion rather than professionalism, by noble failure rather than material success.

Mass-Produced Students

Previously, artists had come out of the art schools or had trained under older, established artists, as Jackson Pollock with Tom Benton. They went to the museums to encounter and study the actual object.

The '50s was the last great decade for the artist doing it first and then finding out what happened. With the '60s, all art history, particularly the ones that had just been pungently, sometimes violently, always vividly acted out in New York (and often in Springs and East Hampton), was documented in a steady stream of slides, mass-produced for all the university students in art departments all over the country.

Sitting in well-stocked libraries, like baby chicks in artificially lit incubators, art students were nourished on the latest reproductions, rather than on the real thing in museums which were generally out of their reach.

The world was ready for the reality of reproduction aesthetics. It was ready for Roy Lichtenstein.

Leo Castelli, whose gallery was the bastion of Abstract Expressionism, was able to turn in a new direction and give America what it wanted, the next new thing. Ultimately, however, after the art historian Robert Rosenblum brought the two men together, it was the charismatic pull of Lichtenstein's intellect that clinched the deal.

He was the spokesman of objects, the ordinary, the everyday, the mundane cartoon image, the narrative icon. At the same time, throughout his work, he makes reference to every phase of art history - to Monet, Picasso, German expressionists.

He calls attention to American Indian surrealism even as he underscores the direct visuality of American low populist culture - the comic strip, in all its Ben Day dots and lines, stripes, dashes and densities, unmodulated opaqueness, and flat consistency.

Roy Lichtenstein is undoubtedly one of the most original artists of our time. He resisted "museum ization," yet was comfortable within its grasp. He was the first to make art as the history of itself and to record his own role in it: the artist who himself has been created by art history.

An Original

He worked, however, at a critical distance, as in his memorable brushstroke series of 1965, a theme, more like an insignia, that reappears throughout the years.

It is his comment on Abstract Expressionism, the tradition of Van Gogh, the prejudice that if it's paint applied with a brush and brushstroke it has to be art.

Meant For Reproduction

His prints were created at the very outset for reproduction - it is and was the original purpose - and they are true to that goal in any size. They do not lose impact in the excellent "The Prints of Roy Lichtenstein: A Catalogue Raisonne 1948-1993," as compared with seeing them on museum walls.

The exclusivity of museum art is exactly what this artist contradicts. The museum show, furthermore, becomes a contamination of the print, rather than the other way around.

In the '60s, as the edges between art-as-history and art-as-making began to flow into each other, it encouraged new, mass-production industrial techniques, particularly of lithography and silkscreen printing. Formerly considered "commercial art," these techniques became, in the hands of Andy Warhol and in the brilliant screenprinting-versus-handpainting dialogues of Roy Lichtenstein, the tools of fine art.

Art's Brain

Lichtenstein eliminated the line between high and low, between fine and commercial art. As Larry Rivers, his friend and neighbor in Southampton, said, he took the hand out of art and put in the brain.

The "excesses of Abstract Expressionism," as some art historians put it - its gut action, non-intellectual gusto for handwork and materials, the need to make it up as it went along, to risk and even invite failure for authenticity - became odious to the new generation of university-trained artists.

To make a name for yourself in the America of the '60s, you didn't have to be Picasso any more and you didn't have to be dead. It was the decade that saw the creation of an American market for American art and American artists, and Roy Lichtenstein was the crucial factor.

Lichtenstein is, in fact, to be understood not only as the aftermath of Abstract Expressionism, but as the beginning of a new American art history.