Word: lichtenstein
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...other hand, you can't really blame Roy Lichtenstein for not living up to Sophocles. Tragic elevation -- or at least the version of it promoted by the rhetoric of late Abstract Expressionism -- was exactly what he 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...
...reacted to these crude and, in most 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...
...Lichtenstein's early strip-based paintings deserve all the enthusiasm they have evoked. Like the Iliad, they come in two basic subjects: girls and war; sometimes, as in The Kiss, 1962, both appear together. The comic frame is the key that enabled Lichtenstein to unlock his nostalgia for experiences he was old enough to have had but didn't -- he went into a pilot training program in Mississippi in 1944 and might have been that pink boy embracing his sweetheart in front of the bomber. His girls are the nymphs of a lost Arcadia of gush, as remote from...
Astutely, Lichtenstein realized that the halftone dots of a printed comic strip could be enlarged along with the rest of the image, but at that stage he didn't know how to do it evenly: he used stencils that smudged, so the big areas of neck and cheek came out with a random sort of acne. They now look touchingly handmade, which is not to their disadvantage, and their sense of formal rigor has lasted well...
...Lichtenstein has been typecast as "the comic-strip artist," but in fact comic strips take up only an early phase of his work. By 1965 he had stopped basing images on them. He was never to refer to comics again, except now and then by including a parody of one of his own earlier paintings in a parody of an elegant interior -- ah, well, I'm a classic too now, feels funny but that's art-life...