Word: benday
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Ribbing. In his early period, Lichtenstein was a latter-day abstract expressionist. When he turned to subject matter, he happened on comic strips, he explains, "because of their anti-artistic image and because they are such a modern subject." He took over the whole cartoon vocabulary, including printers' Benday dots (originally suggested to him by the exaggerated dots on a bubble-gum wrapper), primary Magna colors, heavy, black-outlined forms. "I like taking a discredited subject and putting it into a new unity," Lichtenstein says (currently he is working with 1930s pseudo-Bauhaus modern), "I was serious about...
...kind of popular object-everyone feels he should have a reproduction of a Picasso in his home." In Woman with I Flowered Hat, Lichtenstein did "an oversimplification of Picasso, a kind of 'plain-pipe-racks' Picasso." Portions of the paintings were stenciled with Lichtenstein's distinctive Benday dots (applied with a toothbrush through a perforated screen) to simulate the effect of commercial printing-and also to remind the viewer that he is looking at the popular notion of a Picasso rather than the genuine article...
...quintessential custom car, the dragster, whose only purpose is to accelerate over a quarter-mile straightaway to speeds in excess of 200 m.p.h. "Only an incredibly sophisticated people," he says, "would lavish expensive attention on things of such limited use." He portrayed the goggled drivers with hand-painted benday dots to make them look like newspaper photographs...