1. Does Lichtenstein have anything to say today?
It's well worth asking, as Roy Lichtenstein Prints 1956-97 opens Sunday at the Las Vegas Art Museum. Lichtenstein both savored and satirized the types of images he co-opted. As critic Dave Hickey points out in his essay for the traveling show's catalog, the midcentury "graphic idiom" of comics and posters that propelled Lichtenstein was passing, even as he made his best, or best-known, work. He and other Pop artists elegized a practice as quaint in its way as radio serials.
At the same time, we still have print ads—look around—and comic books have made a sophisticated resurgence. But the visual strategies Lichtenstein mimicked and mourned were overpowered by a three-network media universe. The Benday dot was the pixel of its time, but it was and is mechanical, the hallmark of platens slapping paper, and Lichtenstein's work speaks of that age more than it speaks to ours.
That's not to say that his implied critique of consumerist culture is outdated, as the arguments behind it remain valid—images sometimes manipulate us. Nor was it wrong to take down abstract expressionism's high-minded heroics. By the time of Lichtenstein's first show at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1962, artists had been poking at AbEx pomposity for almost a decade—Robert Rauschenberg with his canny randomness; Jasper Johns with his sober elevations of signs.
Lichtenstein helped crystallize the movement by being, in some ways, its most blunt exponent, with big, bold, primary-color images, exploded to molecular depth. Remember, jazz was cool, ties were skinny and cars were low and sleek. Liking Lichtenstein was a cake-and-eat-it proposition—it affirmed your understanding of marketing's schemes while it confirmed you as a high-art renegade, the sort who reveled in a wall-ful of "WHAAM!"
2. Does praise seem labored?
Speaking of having it both ways, in an essay for a Lichtenstein monograph, Diane Waldman observes that Lichtenstein chose commercial imagery aimed at the middle class because "it provided him with a way of making an anti-art statement that he could then transform into art."
Whether you consider this profound or petulant depends on your tastes, perhaps, but if you read much about Lichtenstein an apologist subtext emerges: He was more than mere prankster; careful examination of pictures shows how he made choices to alter the original image; he was a gifted tactician of the picture plane. He reverenced Monet and Picasso while rendering their work in his trademark style, midcentury mechanizing it. Ironic commentary, sure, but there's a there there.
Elizabeth Brown, chief curator at the Henry Art Gallery, recalls a bumper sticker the artist gave her that proclaims, "obviate nuance." She concludes: "The phrase, an exhortation to eliminate subtleties—cloaked in the most abstruse language—summarizes Lichtenstein's approach to making art." The "abstruse language" makes the joke, of course—it implies subtleties behind the brute-force flattening of them.
Nonetheless, when quoted, Lichtenstein seems to disavow this defense. Waldman repeats his self-description from an early interview: "anti-contemplative, anti-nuance ... anti-movement-and-light, anti-mystery ... and anti- all of those brilliant ideas of preceding movements which everybody understands so perfectly."
Hickey, in his catalog essay, makes the best case, that Lichtenstein's "Large Brushstroke" paintings, his sometimes elegant parodies of sacred gesture, both critiqued and competed with more lyrical art. "As it turned out, then, the irony we read into Lichtenstein's work was, in fact, based on our own conservatism, on our inability to take his cartoon idiom seriously as an artistic vehicle."
3. Why prints?
These prints, from the collections of Oregonian real estate executive Jordan D. Schnitzer and his family foundation, span Lichtenstein's career, from the 1960s into the 1990s. (The artist died in 1997.) Given that he lifted freely from a world of print, it made sense that he worked diligently in some of the country's best printmaking studios throughout his long career. Chris Bruce, the show's curator and director of the Museum of Art at Washington State University, observes that Lichtenstein's "prints evolved from being a kind of expedient way to reproduce an image to constituting a deep exploration of the medium's vast potential."
Material selected to mechanize the personal mark seemed even more mechanical in prints, although fine-art prints are more personal and difficult than photolithographic prints. Late in life, Lichtenstein spoke of trying to dodge precision by making woodcuts, but it is what he valued in printmaking: "The paintings, in spite of me, have a certain handmade look, but in the prints you can achieve that sense of perfection."
4. Does Lichtenstein say anything?
"Lichtenstein's accomplishment," Michael Kimmelman of The New York Times notes in a 2001 review, was "to find a way to breathe new and unexpected life into existing forms, which is what good artists do." It might be, particularly with regard to his prints, that Lichtenstein prompts the viewer to ponder how images are made and reproduced. Or maybe he merely revels in making the subtle blunt.