Word: comic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Brad darling, this painting is a MASTERPIECE!" exclaims a luscious blonde in one of Roy Lichtenstein's celebrated "comic strip" canvases of 1962. "My, soon you'll have all of New York clamoring for your work." Pure boasting? At the time, yes. Lichtenstein's first pop paintings were derided as belonging to the "King Features school," and a bad joke. Today, it's all the way to the bank. At 43, Lichtenstein is a pop hero: half a dozen museums own his work, his every show is a sellout, and his prices have jumped tenfold...
Ripe for 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...
...over the centuries have learned to extract a laugh from almost any event. Last week, acting as the unofficial humor makers of America, they produced a rapid-fire chain of chutzpa-laced jokes about the Middle East conflict that flew as swiftly as a Jewish Superman (see cut). Their comic chronology...
Fine Froth. Offenbach, a dapper dynamo with a prolific melodic gift and a boffo theatrical sense, made the French comic opera of his time into the granddaddy of today's musical comedy. In Orpheus, his first big success, he took what were then scandalous liberties with the Greek legend in order to parody Gluck's opera Orfeo et Euridice, to spoof solemn antiquity worship, and to satirize the manners and morals of the Second Empire under Napoleon III. His fiddle-playing Orpheus is glad to be rid of the unfaithful Eurydice until a character called Public Opinion forces...
Surrounding Caesar in this tasteless Runyonesque rehash are such holders of the borscht belt as Jan Murray, Ben Blue, Bill Dana, George Jessel and Mickey Deems. Of them all, Jessel is the only one comic enough to deserve the name-and that only by parodying his own nasal eulogizing at the services of a policeman who was trampled to death during a movie premiere...