Word: lichtenstein
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...Louis, the post-Pop stylizations of Roy Lichtenstein...
...Lichtenstein was always the most cerebral of the Pop artists. Yet his images in the 1960s, taken from comic strips and ads-"I know how you must feel, Brad!" whispers the enormous girl's mouth to its exclusively art-world audience-were once rebuked for their dumbness, their lack of "real" art content. To mimic the processes of commercial art, to take a common image and replicate it on canvas, much larger, with hard-edged line and stenciled arrays of Ben Day dots in primary colors for shading: Could this be art? Is the Pope Catholic...
...astonishment of Moliere's character on learning that he has been speaking prose" all his life. Suddenly, there was the commercial vernacular of America, that amniotic fluid in which every collector had been nurtured, right there on the museum wall. And the curious paradox was that, in Lichtenstein's case, the fluid -those cartoon images of teen-agers and Korean War jets-was transparent. After a while the imagery hardly got in the way at all, and Lichtenstein could be treated as a formalist much more readily than, say, Claes Oldenburg, with his gross impurities and gargantuan appetite...
...early 1970s, Lichtenstein was fond of quoting Matisse, that supreme artificer of images denoting calm and luxurious revery. Run through Lichtenstein's mill, however, the images lost this aura entirely, becoming stark, neutral or even disagreeable. The three fish in Still Life with Goldfish, 1972, a broad transcription from one of Matisse's still lifes of 60 years before, wear dyspeptic expressions and seem not at all pleased with the painting of a giant Lichtenstein golf ball on the wall behind them...
Enough time in the museum can wash almost any art clean, but Lichtenstein's work, always restrained, has by now reached what amounts to a trance of near mechanical decorum. It scarcely trespasses upon the world of feeling or lived experience. If the word academic means anything in relation to art today, it must apply to Lichtenstein's output: an oeuvre committed to the play of a given set of pictorial mannerisms, faultlessly sustained, often funny and always dryly intelligent, all of them directed toward reducing art to a sequence of predictable signs. Anything can be turned into...