Word: lichtenstein
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...large exhibition of the work from this all-American mannerist's post-Pop years is now on view at the St. Louis Art Museum, titled "Roy Lichtenstein, 1970-1980." The show will be traveling the museum circuit for years, from Seattle to Tokyo via New York, Fort Worth, Cologne, Florence, Paris and Madrid. Organized by Art Historian Jack Cowart, it contains 110 works that together give a good view of the march of Lichtenstein's stylizations...
...exhibit also provides a deftly culture-bound experience. Lichtenstein is nothing if not erudite, and to see him parodying established modern masterpieces (Matisse's Red Studio, or the cubist work of Picasso and Juan Gris, or Carlo Carra's Red Horseman) is to see a very informed mind at work, particularly at obscure levels of parody. How, for instance, does one render the odd ambiguities and shifts of cubist or futurist painting in terms of this rigidly determinate dot-and-line style? Of course, it is not paintings but reproductions that Lichtenstein parodies; reproduction itself reduces...
Whether this point is worth making over and over again, at such length and great expense to collectors, seems moot-though not to Cowart, who detects in Lichtenstein's ability to apply his method an almost Picasso-like energy. "Tomorrow he could take Renaissance, Classical or other known subjects or, on the other hand, quickly invent a new vocabulary of images," Cowart writes in the catalogue. Perhaps, but would it matter? What one misses in a large proportion of the work on view in St. Louis is, simply, the sense of necessity-an engagement deeper than style...
They are also more plainly invented than the works derived from print sources. We do not think of mirror reflections as having a style, and in that sense Lichtenstein's mirror paintings sidle closer to unmediated experience, and so indirectly to nature, than his other work. They also gather poignancy from the fact that they are empty. One gazes at them frontally, as at a real mirror, but nothing shows up in their superficial depths. The spectator is a phantom. These icy, imperturbable tondos and ovals may say more about the nature of Lichtenstein's imagination than anything...
...recent years, Lichtenstein has been preoccupied not merely with parody, but with parodies of parody-paintings based on the cartoonist's view of modern art. There was once a "pop" view of surrealism, loosely derived from Dali and Arp and epitomized in the 1940s in such verses...