Word: lichtenstein
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...retrospective of more than 100 paintings by Roy Lichtenstein, curated by Diane Waldman for the Guggenheim Museum, you can almost cut the atmosphere of deja vu with a knife. Doubtless, part of this is due to the artist's prolonged success in the marketplace; Lichtenstein is a very prolific artist, and his works are in most museums. But their effect has spread far beyond the originals. His images, coming initially out of mass reproduction itself, slide back into it with the utmost ease and have done so for the past 30 years, filling memory with tiny Lichtenstein clones...
Then you have to reckon with their effect on ads, packaging, T shirts, window design in shops, the whole reappropriation party -- amusing and even joyous at first, and then, like most parties, a drag -- that the American commercial world threw to welcome back the images and techniques Lichtenstein took from it and put into a zippier, more art-conscious form, ripe for reuse as "quality" stuff...
...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 himself to it as a celebrity. Thus for the young, Lichtenstein must seem to have been around forever, while for the middle...
Time has done its annoying work, converting Lichtenstein into a historical figure remarkable for his taste, his dependable virtuosity and his pictorial manners. He has become the great academician of the Pop movement -- its equivalent of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, the English artist who, a hundred years ago, attained the summit of popularity with his idealized, skillfully painted and mildly sexy reconstructions of classical Roman life, done again, and again, and again...
...imagine people asking themselves with bated breath, "What will Lichtenstein do next?" You know the 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...