Word: lichtensteins
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Fogg Museum is exhibiting graphic works by Roy Lichtenstein. He's the one whose stuff looks like enlarged comic strips, but, as is always the case in these things, has much more redeeming social importance. Check out the review in yesterday's paper for more details. Through Oct.26...
...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...
...Fogg show includes his earliest comic-book panels from 1963, which first won him his notoriety. Lichtenstein went off on an entirely different tangent in his attempts to convey the wavy fluidity, "the absolute indeterminate essence" of the sun, sky and ocean. He uses a combination of schematic and symbolic lines, actual color photographs, and a shimmering plastic called Rowlux, that in any other context--the plastic body of a comb or a brush, a drug-store display, a hair-salon wall--would be called vulgar. But here it is uncanny in its hypnotic approximation of nature...
...CHILD would appreciate the colors and patterns of a Lichtenstein. The lines are crisp, elegant, simple, classical. The colors are bright, true, eloquent, joyful. They really are a sensual delight to look at. What more appropriate reason...
Granted, they resemble slick magazine graphics or modern interior design. But is that necessarily a fault? It is not so much that Lichtenstein is so bad that he resembles commercial art, but that commercial art is good because it has learned the practical lessons of Mondrian, Picasso and modern art. Because of their plentifulness and familiarity we take for granted and deprecate the superb graphics of magazines like Playboy, Esquire, and National Lampoon. But how many boring dull articles have we been snared into by eye-catching graphics? And in a hundred years, how many architecture students will be studying...