<Archive Obituaries> Roy Lichtenstein (September 29th 1997)
Bill Schenley
Photo:
http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/gallery/2005/01/13/lichtenstein3.jpg
FROM: The New York Times (September 30th 1997) ~
By Michael Kimmelman
Roy Lichtenstein, the quintessential master of Pop painting and a
major figure in American art since he began scavenging comics like
"Winnie Winkle," "G.I. Combat" and "Secret Hearts" ("I don't care! I'd
rather sink -- than call Brad for help!"), died yesterday at New York
University Medical Center in Manhattan. He was 73 and lived in
Manhattan.
The cause was complications from pneumonia, said his wife, Dorothy.
Mr. Lichtenstein gained attention at his debut in 1962 at the Leo
Castelli Gallery in Manhattan with work that seemed bent on deflating
Abstract Expressionism, with its soul-searching claims and its
emphasis on the eloquence of the artist's touch. By contrast, Mr.
Lichtenstein's art looked wicked, ironic and freeze-dried, as if
manufactured, because it mimicked in cunningly streamlined form the
black outlines, flat vivid colors and Ben Day dots of the funny pages.
Somehow he managed to take an essentially anonymous style and make it
into something unmistakably his own.
"Roy got the hand out of art, and put the brain in," was how the
painter Larry Rivers described Mr. Lichtenstein's accomplishment. He
was a a saboteur, offering 1990's irony in the 1960's. And if in later
years he was sometimes taken for granted, it was partly because his
ideas had so infiltrated art that they were no longer only his. Mixing
text and image, high and low, his whole strategy of appropriation
paved the way for a generation of artists not yet born, or at least
not yet out of elementary school, when he cribbed a picture of a girl
holding a beach ball aloft from a newspaper advertisement for Mount
Airy Lodge in the Poconos.
In an interview in 1963, Mr. Lichtenstein showed himself to be a
provocateur, saying he wanted to make an art so despicable that no one
would hang it. Probably not even he dreamed at the time that
collectors would some day pay millions of dollars to put his art on
their walls. Since the 1950's, "everyone was hanging everything," he
continued in the interview. "It was almost acceptable to hang a
dripping paint rag. Everyone was accustomed to this. The one thing
everyone hated was commercial art."
As a consequence, his own art, he said, was "anti-contemplative,
anti-nuance, anti-getting-away-from-the-tyranny-of-the-rectangle,
anti-movement and anti-light, anti-mystery, anti-paint-quality,
anti-Zen, and anti- all of those brilliant ideas of preceding
movements which everyone understands so thoroughly."
Still, it was never easy to know just how seriously to take Mr.
Lichtenstein. Years later he also said, "I wouldn't believe anything I
tell you." And it quickly became clear, after his Castelli debut, that
his interests extended beyond just making the culture of Mickey Mouse
and Bazooka Bubble Gum wrappers into a new parodic and heraldic art.
By the end of the 60's, in fact, he quit using comic book sources.
Working in one basic mode for the better part of 40 years, he turned
out paintings that mimicked Picasso, Cezanne and Mondrian, treating
them in much the same way that Andy Warhol treated Marilyn Monroe and
Elvis Presley: as brand names of popular culture. "I wasn't putting
down Picasso or Mondrian or Cezanne or Monet or anyone else," he later
explained. "What I think I was doing was to take a kind of idiot's
view of, say, Picasso, and make a painting of that. The subject for me
wasn't Picasso, but someone's funny idea of Cubism."
At the same time Mr. Lichtenstein painted landscapes, interiors and
nudes, even images of pyramids whose geometry and compressed
abstraction might be more commonly associated with painters like
Ellsworth Kelly.
He made sculptures, prints, giant murals like the five-story-tall
"Mural with Blue Brush Strokes" for the lobby of the Equitable Center
in Manhattan. And in later decades, he exhibited drawings that had
been his private exercises and preparatory studies; they had about
them a feathery, almost hesitant touch very different from his bold
and assertive paintings.
An Unmistakably American Quality
So, on what had seemed a one-liner of an idea, Mr. Lichtenstein
composed unforeseen variations. They tumbled out like circus clowns
from a Volkswagen. The criticism of his art that resulted was, in
fact, that he turned everything into the same essential cryogenic
image: he became an industry of his own skillful pastiches.
To all of these images there was, nonetheless, a particular and
unmistakably American quality: a lean, laconic scrutiny of the world
that separated his art even from the paintings of Europeans of his
generation, like Richard Hamilton and Sigmar Polke, who also borrowed
from pop culture sources. Certainly his tone dovetailed with his
personality, which was famously reticent and wry.
How much his subjects may actually have had to do with his own life
has been a matter of debate. During the early- to mid-60's, when his
first marriage was breaking up, he painted various comely women in
conditions of distress, like "Drowning Girl" and "Frightened Girl."
"Hopeless" shows a teary blonde beneath the words: "That's the way --
it should have begun! But it's hopeless!" "In the Car" depicts a
moment of chilly silence between a man and woman.
On all this and more, however, Mr. Lichtenstein said little and
revealed less. A trim, slight, shy man who in his later years wore his
silver hair in a tight ponytail, he had a Cheshire cat grin and a
combination of mocking and self-mocking humor that masked his
seriousness.
"I don't have any big anxieties," he once said. "I wish I did. I'd be
much more interesting."
Roy Lichtenstein was born on Oct. 27, 1923, on the Upper West Side of
Manhattan, the only son of Milton Lichtenstein, a prosperous real
estate dealer, and Beatrice Werner Lichtenstein.
As a boy, quiet and a loner, he became interested in science and
recalled listening to the "Flash Gordon" and "Mandrake the Magician"
serials on the radio. To the end of his life, he would pore over
Scientific American and Science News.
He began taking art courses at 16 and in the summer of 1940 attended
Reginald Marsh's life class at the Art Students League. "I did sort of
appalling paintings," he once remembered. "A kind of Reginald Marsh
realism."
After graduating from Benjamin Franklin High School in Manhattan he
enrolled at Ohio State University in Columbus to study art. He was
drafted in 1943 and served with the engineer battalion of the 69th
Infantry Division in Europe during World War II.
In Paris, at the end of the war, like many other American G.I.'s
interested in art, he stopped outside Picasso's apartment on the Rue
des Grands-Augustins on the Left Bank. But Mr. Lichtenstein could not
bring himself to ring the bell: "I walked away after a while thinking,
'Why would Picasso want to see me?' "
He returned to Ohio State, completed his master's degree in 1951 and
taught art there. After being denied tenure, he moved from Columbus to
Cleveland, where he had already met Isabel Wilson, a co-director of an
art gallery there, whom he married.
For a few years he kept himself employed doing window displays at
Halle's Department Store and sheet-metal designs for Republic Steel.
A Variety of Modes, With Tongue in Cheek
Meanwhile he was making trips to New York City to see the art shows
and just to sit at the Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village, although he
was too shy to introduce himself to de Kooning, Pollock, Franz Kline
and the other New York School painters who frequented the bar. He also
began to exhibit: his first solo show in Manhattan was at the
Carlebach Gallery in 1951.
Mr. Lichtenstein took with him lessons learned at Ohio State from his
teacher Hoyt Sherman, a late Fauvist who insisted that even
representational art be regarded not as a mirror of life but as
fundamentally formal and abstract. Mr. Lichtenstein remained strongly
influenced by Mr. Sherman.
Through the 50's he painted and made sculptures in a variety of modes,
often tongue in cheek, sometimes influenced by Picasso, Klee,
Fragonard or the Abstract Expressionists. He painted medieval
subjects, images of anthropomorphic plants and themes of American
folklore, including a takeoff of Emanuel Leutze's "Washington Crossing
the Delaware." So it was not exactly a big leap to his paintings of
the early 60's based on comic books and advertisements.
What was important in all these cases was his stress on art as a
variable system of formal conventions, essentially abstract. The
paradox of his work remains an outward embrace of images of everyday
life belying an inward stress on art as arrangements of colors and
shapes. "When I have used cartoon images, I've used them ironically,"
he insisted, "to raise the question, 'Why would anyone want to do this
with modern painting?' "
In the late 60's, when he began to parody Abstract Expressionist
paintings by making works of flat, anonymous and cartoonlike brush
strokes that were the antithesis of the brush stroke as a kind of
expressive fingerprint, he explained the works by saying: "Actually I
love the Abstract Expressionists, or I like the ones I like, anyway.
My work is, after all, a kind of straitjacket. I did those pictures
because it was my way of saying, 'You see, painting is a tree made out
of brush strokes.' "
Abstract Expressionists "put things down on the canvas and responded
to what they had done, to the color positions and sizes," he said. "My
style looks completely different, but the nature of putting down lines
pretty much is the same; mine just don't come out looking
calligraphic, like Pollock's or Kline's."
In 1957, Mr. Lichtenstein left Cleveland with his wife and their two
sons, David and Mitchell, and accepted a variety of teaching jobs in
New York and New Jersey until his painting career caught on. A fellow
teacher at Rutgers University was Allan Kaprow, an artist and
originator of the Happenings, through whom he also met Claes Oldenburg
and others who were to define Pop Art in the early 60's.
Mr. Kaprow once recalled telling him, "You can't teach color from
Cezanne, you can only teach it from something like this," pointing to
a Bazooka wrapper. Contact with artists like Mr. Kaprow and Mr.
Oldenburg, combined with the experience of seeing the early
exhibitions of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, clearly paved the
way for Mr. Lichtenstein's first Pop pictures, like "Look Mickey"
(1961), which he called his "first painting with no expressionism in
it."
He soon became so famous, or rather notorious, that by 1964, Life
magazine published an article about him asking, "Is he the worst
artist in America?"
His work was widely interpreted, at least at first, as a critical
commentary on modern industrial society because of its allusions to
contemporary culture and its pseudo-mechanical look. But Mr.
Lichtenstein was reluctant to interpret his own art in those terms.
"We like to think of industrialization as being despicable," he told
an interviewer in the 60's. "I don't really know what to make of it.
There's something terribly brittle about it. I suppose I would still
prefer to sit under a tree with a picnic basket than under a gas pump,
but signs and comic strips are interesting as subject matter. There
are certain things that are usable, forceful and vital about
commercial art."
The Pop artists, he added, are "using those things, but we're not
really advocating stupidity, international teen-agerism and
terrorism."
In 1965 he was divorced and moved to the Bowery, into a former bank
and warehouse also occupied by Adolph Gottlieb. Two years later, he
began to spend summers in Southampton, on Long Island, then worked and
lived there year-round for a while. In 1968 he married Dorothy Herzka,
whom he had met a few years earlier in a Manhattan gallery where she
worked. He is survived by his wife; his sons, David, a musician and
computer engineer, of Oakland, Calif., and Mitchell, an actor, of
Garrison, N.Y.; a sister, Rene Tolcott of Washington, and a grandson.
A Singular Factory To Produce His Images
In 1984, Mr. Lichtenstein acquired a loft at 105 East 29th Street in
Manhattan for his studio. Visitors noticed its no-nonsense efficiency
and likened it to a factory, with the painted image of a Swiss cheese
on the elevator doors. He worked on several pictures at once, and a
row of easels held them at different angles and in various states of
completion. A man of habit, he abided by strict hours, pausing for
lunch precisely at 1 P.M.
He had a circle of friends but never courted the celebrity that was
afforded him, as peers like Warhol did. He once said that he planned
to mark his grave "with a big red flashing neon arrow."
In the Metropolitan Museum of Art a few years ago, looking at several
paintings by Ellsworth Kelly, he mused on abstraction and on how
artists like to deceive others, and themselves. Mr. Kelly, he
recalled, had said that his abstractions derived from nature, which
led Mr. Lichtenstein to remark:
"I don't know why you'd want to say your work comes from nature,
because art is related to perception, not nature. All abstract artists
try to tell you that what they do comes from nature, and I'm always
trying to tell you that what I do is completely abstract. We're both
saying something we want to be true.
"In fact, I don't think artists like myself have the faintest idea
what we're doing, but we try to put it in words that sound logical.
Actually, I think I do know what I'm doing. But no other artist does."
CORRECTION:
Because of an editing error, the obituary of the painter Roy
Lichtenstein yesterday misidentified the high school he attended in
Manhattan. It was the Franklin School (now called the Dwight School),
not Benjamin Franklin High School.
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His art: http://www.leninimports.com/lichtenstein2.jpg
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Roy Lichtenstein: Pop With Snap And Crackle
FROM: The Guardian (October 1st 1997) ~
By Norbert Lynton
It is difficult to think of Roy Lichtenstein, who has died of
pneumonia at the age of 73, as other than a man of the 1960s, one of
the brightest stars of the American Pop Art movement which shot to
fame and notoriety in New York in 1961-62.
This was exactly when Britain's Pop painters - Kitaj, Hockney, Allen
Jones and others - found themselves being loved and celebrated in the
new colour supplements and on television. Who got there first can
still be argued about: what is certain is that in those years the art
world expanded enormously.
By the end of the sixties exhibitions on both sides of the Atlantic
were already memorialising Pop art as though to write finis under it
all, with gratitude, but also a lot of art-historical nit -picking.
Though almost all of the stars on what was by then a truly
international firmament have gone on twinkling, the movement as such
had reached something akin to middle age, which in this context means
senility. In any case, there was a new movement to come to grips with,
Conceptual Art: much less fun and rarely as brilliant visually.
Of course, we had it easy in Britain, with Richard Hamilton, Eduardo
Paolozzi and others, bringing commercial imagery and methods into
their paintings and prints from the mid-1950s on. In America there was
much more of a shock and a rumpus. I recall a public discussion at the
old ICA in Dover Street about Pop at which we listened to well-known
American critics denouncing their own artists as traitors to the high
ideals of American expressionism and thus destroyers of art in
general. There was none of the sudden, widespread enthusiasm in New
York that we had in London. One of the big issues was whether doing
paintings from advertising and from comic strips could possibly
deserve the name of art.
Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol did not know each other when they both
began to work with these sources. Lichtenstein had been exploring the
use of Disney creatures in semi-abstract paintings and then also those
much coarser images, small black-line newspaper advertisements for
common goods such as sofas and golf balls. In 1956 he had even made a
free-hand, rather than exact, lithograph of a 10-dollar bill, flat on
and filling the sheet the way Jasper Johns's painted American flags of
that time filled their canvases.
In any case, this had all been part of a gradual development.
Lichtenstein was born into a solid middle-class New York family.
Painting was something of a hobby for teenaged Roy, but so was jazz,
and he combined them in portraits of musicians. A summer school at the
Art Students' League found him painting Bowery and Coney Island scenes
under the tutelage of Reginald Marsh, himself a major New York social
realist.
From this he went on to the School of Fine Arts at Ohio State
University where he found himself fascinated by lectures on the
psychology of vision and representation. US Army service brought him
to Europe for the last years of the war, 1943-45, and a short course
on French civilisation and language in Paris. Then he returned to Ohio
State, studying and instructing and graduating in 1950.
Stylistically he moved between semi-abstract work in various Cubist
manners and his personal version of Abstract Expressionism. He worked
for some years as an engineering draftsman and then also briefly as a
graphic artist while having almost annual one-man shows in New York,
marrying and becoming a father. In 1960 he was appointed professor of
Rutgers University where he met Alan Kaprow, the recent initiator of
Happenings reflecting on consumer culture, and got involved with
Kaprow's circle of collaborators and friends, who included Claes
Oldenburg and Jim Dine.
In 1961 he painted his first Pop paintings. He took them to the Leo
Castelli Gallery in New York that autumn and soon after saw his first
Warhols there. His own 1962 show at Castelli's made his name, and he
was included in the first museum exhibition to focus on The New
Paintings of Common Objects at the Pasadena Art Museum the same year.
I met him shortly after the Venice Biennale of 1966 and recall vividly
a man who struck me as surprisingly un-vivid. He was shy, hesitantly
friendly, thoughtful but not full of ready ideas and convictions.
Other American artists I had met had been more up-front, physically
sometimes, in their assertions. This experience was reinforced in 1968
when a comprehensive Lichtenstein exhibition was shown at the Tate
Gallery as part of its European tour. I have rarely enjoyed and
admired a one-man exhibition as much. It had all the intelligence and
energy I had hoped to find in the man.
The comic-strip paintings stood out, and I still think of them as his
most brilliant work. Seeing them in the flesh was, of course, the
essential thing. Pictures that are themselves more or less
reproductions do not reproduce well. Here were frames and cropped
images from comic strips translated into large paintings, coarse
printing of skilfully but quickly drawn and coloured narrative scenes
subtly redesigned and redrawn to become modern history paintings. War
and peace, romantic bliss and romantic pain - scenes at once ordinary
and irresistible: all firm and clear, as though they were stills from
a film directed by Hiroshige, the great Japanese printmaker.
Lichtenstein's technique was perfect for his purposes. He had found a
way of imitating the dots of newsprint by painting through perforated
steel, but he knew also where to use unbroken areas of colour and what
weight and scale to give to the thoughts and cries that rise as
balloons from warriors and lovers. The Tate Gallery made a brilliant
choice in acquiring his great diptych WHAAM!, a Pop echo in its
juxtaposing of seeing with what is being seen of Gauguin's famous
Vision after the Sermon in Edinburgh.
There was always something new from Lichtenstein to be seen and
evaluated. But the excitement, the joy, dropped as he moved into his
fifties and sixties, even though there was never any loss of skill and
intellectual as well as visual brightness.
Roy Lichtenstein, artist, born October 27, 1923; died September 29,
1997
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More art: http://www.francescomorante.it/images/316b1.jpg
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FROM: The Independent (October 1st 1997) ~
By David Cohen
Roy Lichtenstein, artist: born New York 27 October 1923; married 1949
Isabel Wilson (two sons; marriage dissolved), 1968 Dorothy Herzka;
died New York 29 September 1997.
The veteran Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein built his very considerable
fame and fortune on the unlikely foundations of irony and decoration.
He was, par excellence, an artist with attitude, trading in an
unabashedly chic nihilism.
At the outset of his career he was able to shock a highbrow art scene
with brazen, seemingly unmediated and uncritical appropriations of the
visual detritus of mass culture. Look Mickey (1961) was one of the
defining images of the new Pop style: Donald Duck out fishing with his
friend exclaims "Look, Mickey, I've hooked a big one" in a frame of
Disney cartoon exploded on to canvas.
By the time his art matured - if one can use this word in relation to
Lichtenstein - the shock turned to bemusement that an artist could
continue to produce work within such slight visual and intellectual
confines as he had set for himself. Till his dying day, his trademark
style remained the cartoon writ large.
In a 1963 interview Lichtenstein established his credentials as a
career nihilist with a series of answers as suave, nonchalant and
savvy as his art and style always remained. Asked if he was
anti-experimental, he replied: "I think so, and anti-contemplative,
anti-nuance, anti - getting - away - from -
the-tyranny-of-the-rectangle, anti-movement-and-light, anti-mystery,
anti - paint - quality, anti-Zen, and anti all of those brilliant
ideas of preceding movements which everyone understands so thoroughly.
Lichtenstein really was Mr Cool. He had none of the complexity and
tragic element of Andy Warhol, nor the implicitly critical attitude of
Claes Oldenburg or Allen Kaprow (an early mentor). His 1960s work was
read by some as an indictment of consumer culture, but as his career
proceeded it became clear that his was far more of a celebration of
pop culture than a critique. Actually, though, even to talk of
celebration is to over- interpret. Lichtenstein always maintained a
stiff upper lip of diffident neutrality. Whether he was parodying old
masters or appropriating romance and action comic strips he would go
gentle on the originals, as keen to exploit the visual effectiveness
of his source material as to debunk it.
Roy Lichtenstein was born in New York City in 1923 and took classes
with the great Realist painter Reginald Marsh at the Art Students
League in 1940. He completed his studies in the Mid-West, however,
staying on to teach at Ohio State University after military service in
Europe. He once joked that there didn't seem much going on in New York
at the time.
He was quite candid about his desire to cut an image in an art scene
dominated by Abstract Expressionism which left little room for a
newcomer to do anything shocking. "It was hard to get a painting that
was despicable enough so that no one would hang it. . . The one thing
everyone hated was commercial art; apparently they didn't hate that
enough either."
In his use and adaptation of graphic design within a fine-art context
Lichtenstein was supremely skilful; part of his brilliance, in fact,
was to make it look as if his appropriation was unmediated. Initially
he answered the charge that he did not transform his source material
by arguing - shrewdly - that no art transforms: "It doesn't. It just
plain forms."
But, apart from the transformation that occurs through dislocation of
scale, giving new aesthetic meaning to the expediencies of printing
technology - the Ben Day dots, the bold, simplified curves - within
its new context, Lichtenstein did, as it happens, modify his sources,
splicing together various images to form the ready-made he actually
wanted, simplifying captions, idealising features. This was especially
the case with his women of the mid-1960s: all-American square-jawed
cinematic blondes. And his choice of materials by this stage was
already nostalgic for a golden age of mass culture at least a decade
anterior.
Lichtenstein's appropriations may have started raw, but they soon
became, if not cooked, at least cured. However indignant one is at
their banality, his classic works have an undoubted presence, if not
aura.
When Lichtenstein finally moved on from the ready-made images to
originate his own compositions he retained as his signature style the
Ben Day dot and other accoutrements of the comic strip. With this
language, at once super-impersonal and unmistakably his own, he was
equipped with all the means necessary for endless cycles of pastiche.
Where Cezanne set out to redo Poussin after nature, Lichtenstein could
redo Picasso, Leger, Matisse, Monet haystacks, Chinese scroll
painting, Mondrian, even Herge (Tintin) after Ben Day.
His most pertinent parody - his best art-world cartoon - was his
depictions of beefy, dripping, slapdash abstract expressionist
"brushstrokes", meticulously achieved in black outline and pure colour
over a "canvas" made up of the inevitable dots.
Because he generally worked in primary colours and his adopted
technique entailed bright, clean, emphatic shapes, Lichtenstein had
fortuitously - or ingeniously - hit upon a style which blended well
with the very high modernism he was at work debunking. His scale,
colour and facture actually harmonised with all the strictures of pure
abstraction, profoundly ill at ease though Pop Art and painterly
abstraction were with one another. Lichtenstein himself believed that
"the formalist statement in my work will become clearer in time".
Represented from 1962 by the redoubtable dealer Leo Castelli,
Lichtenstein settled down to enjoy a career of uninterrupted,
seemingly untroubled commercial and institutional success. By the end,
he seemed almost to be beyond irony, his reworkings of classical
images or his still-lifes and interiors were content with their own
masterful slickness. (On the other hand, his late works can be seen to
be ironic about his own irony!) A "straight" work like Interior with
Built-In Bar, 1991, exhibited so effectively in a room by itself at
the Royal Academy's Pop Art exhibition that year, achieves a classical
poise and stasis that belies the insolence of its banal and reductive
means.
By this stage, this comic-strip style was more famous for being
Lichtenstein's than for being Benjamin Day's or the mass media's. In a
peculiar twist, the ubiquitous had become particular.
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More art:
http://images.easyart.com/i/prints/rw/lg/6/9/Roy-Lichtenstein-Kiss-V--br--Silkscreen-print--6918.jpg