Word: lichtensteiners
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...Museum of Fine Arts. This year the esteemed institution ditched Winslow Homer and went pop. The season opened with the potpourri contemporary art show, "Face and Figure," a conglomeration of New England artists and world-renowned avant-garde figures. Souls were sold for a Herb Ritts exhibit and Roy Lichtenstein offered his take on Chinese landscape painting...
...vanished. The circuit with the worship of newness in the larger culture had closed. The first beneficiary of this situation was Pop Art, the first wholly accessible style of international Modernism--an art about consumption that sat up and begged to be consumed. Its epitome was Roy Lichtenstein, who emerged in the '60s with his enormously stylish renderings of the least arty art within reach--romance and adventure comic strips...
Unlike the Chinese paintings upstairs, however, several of Lichtenstein's canvases become overwhelmed by these tangles of shifting dot screens. In these cases, the dots seem to be vibrating, creating an effect more dizzying then restful...
...extremely large scale of Lichtenstein's paintings furthers this effect. Their expansive area inscribes the viewer in a spatial relationship that mirrors the tiny scale of the figures in the Chinese paintings' infinite landscapes. Just as the miniature men are almost lost within the Song paintings, we are literally dwarfed by the immense scale of Lichtenstein's work and can never really hold the entire image in our visual field. Only by backing up as far as the gallery allows can we get a good look at the whole composition, but Lichtenstein jokes that we can never really possess nature...
...presenting a variety of preliminary sketches and collages, MFA curator Barbara Stern Shapiro provides important insight into Lichtenstein's working process. She also includes four landscape monotypes by Degas, which Lichtenstein credits as the initial inspiration for his atmospheric landscapes. However, a formal comparison between Degas' prints and Lichtenstein's paintings yields few enlightening similarities, perhaps suggesting that artistic inspiration, like Chinese landscapes, is better left veiled in mystery...