Word: lichtenstein
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...Lichtenstein's prints are like medieval Christian didactic panels. They communicate instantly. Their iconography is easily recognizable, their meaning concentrated and abstracted. It is this element of caricature--caricature achieved by reducing something to its most essential and distinctive elements--that Lichtenstein is trying to isolate, detach and analyse...
...Lichtenstein should above all, be enjoyed. For all the reputed sophistication of American youth, they turn out to be a surprisingly conservative and prudish bunch. "This is the wasteland!" the girl beside me at the gallery tsked disapprovingly. Look at the gorgeous colors, I wanted to say, look at the hypnotic use of Rowlux plastic, the bold. creamy black outlines. But the girl had shuffled away mumbling apocalyptically about the fate of modern...
Certainly a part of this reaction is that Puritan guilt yanking at the American heart strings: art is supposed to be work, back-breaking, meticulous, a blood and sweat document of the starving artist. Lichtenstein seems like the smart-aleck who is getting away with cheating...
...subject matter is probably as much the cause. Matisse and Picasso got away with graceful, terse summarizations of the female nude. And Van Gogh is said to be the individual talent interacting with the artistic tradition when he hacked out the bad imitations of Delacroix and Rembrandt. But because Lichtenstein glorifies and celebrates the succinct essence of hamburgers, comic strips and warehouses, because he reworks Monet's Haystacks and Picasso's Bull with the slick techniques of modern graphics, he is lowered to insultable altitudes--down from the ivory tower of unintelligibility which protects most artists, thanks to the vanity...
...response is that ineffable "gut feeling," which in this age of narcissistic fiction, is resurrected to onanistic worship. But a gut feeling, exactly because its vague origin, which is so often confused with mystic truthfulness, is associational in its logic. The shudder of revulsion that comes when viewing a Lichtenstein is probably not an artistic response, but an externally motivated one, prompted by the antibourgeois biases of contemporary culture...