Word: lichtensteins
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...Streamers is only incidentally about Viet Nam. Men do not need a war to touch their heart of darkness, Rabe seems to suggest; the threat of human intimacy is provocation enough. Are they men like Billy (Matthew Modine), a fresh-faced lad with a college education? Or Richie (Mitchell Lichtenstein), an upper-class homosexual with a taste for taunt? Or Roger (David Alan Grier), a sweet-natured black who deflects each insult with a shrug? Or Carlyle (Michael Wright), the slum-bred black spoiling for a quick apocalypse? Doesn't matter. When the crisis comes, they will...
...Stan Lichtenstein Oakland, Calif...
This is the caricature of surrealist kitsch that Lichtenstein invokes in paintings like Reclining Nude, 1977: one figure sporting Swiss-cheese holes à la Henry Moore, another in a stiff suit like a Magritte businessman, a Kandinsky-style squiggle here, an Arpish wiggle there...
...parodying the most recognizable traits of textbook modernism as reflected by its satirists, Lichtenstein may certainly be said to display a post-modernist sensibility; but what else is going on? Not, it appears, very much, and to call these paintings "visionary," as Cowart does, is to overrate them. Rather, they are grounded on a somewhat smug familiarity with the power of cliche. That, of course, is one dilemma of art education...
...effect, Lichtenstein's show invites us to have the cake and eat it too-to see his work as part of a "heroic" historical continuum while deriding the cliches to which that continuum has been worn down. But this cannot divert the suspicion that, for all his manifest abilities as wit and designer, his art has become repetitious. -By Robert Hughes