Word: comic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...last season's Emmy-winning episode The Contest, in which the characters competed to be "master of your domain"). In reality, the show is more densely textured, elaborately plotted and psychologically astute than any other comedy on TV. It is, moreover, the product of two distinct but oddly congruent comic personalities: David, 46, a dour ex-stand-up comic and writer (he appeared in ABC's failed late-night show Fridays and spent one season writing for Saturday Night Live, where only one of his sketches ever aired), and Seinfeld, 39, a star who is just as active behind...
There was nothing quality-ridden about the artist's original sources -- a smudgy, one-column figure of a girl with a beach ball advertising a resort in the Poconos, a moony frame from a romance comic. But by the time such things had been run through the loop from ad to art to ad again, they had become as invested with glamour as a photo by Avedon. The sheer pervasiveness of Lichtenstein's style rivals and maybe even exceeds Warhol's, even though, unlike Warhol, he kept his own distance from the ad industry as an artist and never offered...
...Monet's versions of Rouen Cathedral, from Mondrian's squares to the generic brushstroke of late Abstract Expressionism. It will have a number of concealed jokes for the art-initiated, often genuinely funny ones -- as when, redoing Matisse's Still Life with "Dance" in 1974, Lichtenstein inserted a comic-strip blast of musical notes to give the figures something to jive to and popped a straw-bound Chianti flask (an archetypal kitsch symbol of the artist's studio) into the still life in the foreground...
...reacted against when he started out during the early '60s. Was real American art loaded with signs of commitment and authenticity -- Pollock drips, De Kooning stripes? Then Lichtenstein would go to the opposite extreme and paint thin copies of the least arty things within reach: romance and adventure comic strips...
...eyes, culturally negligible designs in the way an earlier American stylist, Elie Nadelman, had responded to anonymous folk art. He found beauty and a sort of wry pathos in them, along with a disregarded but distinct sense of style. Lichtenstein wasn't the first artist to react to American comic strips. Miro is plausibly said to have been influenced by George Herriman's now classic Krazy Kat. Apart from Stuart Davis, however, he was the first American artist to do so, because American artists had always been rather ashamed of their own vernacular...