Word: comic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Fogg Museum is exhibiting graphic works by Roy Lichtenstein. He's the one whose stuff looks like enlarged comic strips, but, as is always the case in these things, has much more redeeming social importance. Check out the review in yesterday's paper for more details. Through Oct.26...
Aesthetic sense demands ironic distance, be it geographic or in time, because what is unconsciously accepted is often also what is most beautiful. This is not a sociological justification of Lichtenstein; although his blow up paintings of comic-book panels, sandwiches and soda-pop, is as lucid and incisive a reflection of American life as any contemporary art. And portrayal of the culture of its origin remains a justification of art. But Lichtenstein's work stands up on its own in purely sensual terms, and also in formal aesthetic terms...
LICHTENSTEIN attacks the very distinction between illusion and reality, symbol and representation. Even though we know that the comic-book characters in his paintings are charicatures, the sentiments depicted by the disembodied panels are so overwhelming that we cannot help but participate in the drama. Even though we know that the painting of a sandwich and soda pop is schematic and does not even attempt traditional modelling and shading, our first reaction that it does represent the object is so powerful and so instantaneous that it almost actually becomes the subject...
...Picasso got away with graceful, terse summarizations of the female nude. And Van Gogh is said to be the individual talent interacting with the artistic tradition when he hacked out the bad imitations of Delacroix and Rembrandt. But because Lichtenstein glorifies and celebrates the succinct essence of hamburgers, comic strips and warehouses, because he reworks Monet's Haystacks and Picasso's Bull with the slick techniques of modern graphics, he is lowered to insultable altitudes--down from the ivory tower of unintelligibility which protects most artists, thanks to the vanity of a public that does not want to be thought...
...Fogg show includes his earliest comic-book panels from 1963, which first won him his notoriety. Lichtenstein went off on an entirely different tangent in his attempts to convey the wavy fluidity, "the absolute indeterminate essence" of the sun, sky and ocean. He uses a combination of schematic and symbolic lines, actual color photographs, and a shimmering plastic called Rowlux, that in any other context--the plastic body of a comb or a brush, a drug-store display, a hair-salon wall--would be called vulgar. But here it is uncanny in its hypnotic approximation of nature...