Word: benday
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...personal "image," was the most popular of any Pop artist's. You could pick out his style underwater or a mile away, and it had none of the morbid undercurrent of Warhol's. It was its own logo. It fairly crackled with assertion and impersonality, both at once. Those Benday dots, that studied neutrality of surface, that not-so-simple love of a vernacular (romance and action comics of the '50s) that was already receding into nostalgia when Lichtenstein took it up in the '60s--whom else could it have belonged...
...would be easy to argue that Roy Lichtenstein has never made an original image. Rather he has made images of images for 35 years, whether literal copies of comic book cells or appropriations of Monet and Pollock, all executed in his signature Benday dots. Yet although one might think this persistent stylistic vision would eventually grow boring, his new Landscapes in the Chinese Style prove otherwise...
...answers, we need only turn to any of the exhibition's 17 striking canvases, where tiny scholars and fishing boats cower under misty, mountains. In Yellow Cliffs, three Benday dot cliff faces drop steeply from the painting's upper left corner. At the bottom, Lichtenstein's fluid, black contour describes an undulating boulder. This black outline, originally taken from comic books, contains a small patch of red parallel lines, which were used to denote shading in the half-tone prints of newspapers and magazines...
...answer, although the exact image he will do it to is as yet unknown. It will be done very well, probably on a huge canvas, with perfect decorum and an unfaltering sense of design, every black line in its right place, not a slippage in the stripes and Benday dots. Its flat, posterish colors will read with infrangible aplomb. It will parody other art, as in the past Lichtenstein's work has parodied everything from Art Deco to synthetic Cubism, from Franz Marc's horses to Monet's versions of Rouen Cathedral, from Mondrian's squares to the generic brushstroke...
Instead he turned to incongruous subjects that didn't fit his achieved style: huge versions of Abstract Expressionist brushstrokes, perversely rendered in flat color and Benday dots; or, most successfully, mirrors. The Mirror paintings of 1969-72 remain entrancing because of all Lichtenstein's later work, they are the only ones in which his now cleaned-up techniques allowed for a degree of mystery and ambiguity: they are perfect and icy, and reflect nothing but themselves -- a proleptic comment on his own future work...