February 23, 2006
The true colors of Roy Lichtenstein
Tearful blondes wait and worry for their men, suffering through their makeup and lipstick. Jet afterburners spew bright flames as missiles strike enemy planes with colorful, fiery mid-air explosions.
For most, even a glance at such images conjures up the name of the artist, Roy Lichtenstein, who with Andy Warhol came to personify the “pop” art school that came into vogue in the 1960s.
But as visitors to the Henry Art Gallery will see in the museum’s new exhibit, Roy Lichtenstein: Prints 1956-1997, there is more to this household name of pop art than it at first seems. While his name may be forever synonymous with the high-style pop look and content, his body of work is far greater and more complex than his comic-style art might indicate. The exhibit will remain up until May 7.
“The point of the show is to re-evaluate the work and look at the range of expression,” said Liz Brown, chief curator at the Henry, who, as it happens, did her master’s thesis on Lichtenstein and his work. “I think it’s really important to see that he’s one of the first artists to create, or to play, in the difference between what you think you are seeing and what it’s really about.”
Brown, who has great feeling for what happens in the exciting moments when people encounter art, explained a bit more: “He makes things that look really simple and really brash. They look like one-liners, but if you spend a little bit more time with them, you start seeing they mean five or six different things. You just have to get past the one-liner to see it.”
The exhibit’s layout helps that. Visitors can take in classic Lichtenstein — he of the jet engines, explosions and women in close-up — and then step beyond those, literally as well as figuratively, to see what else the artist was capable of. As Brown said, Lichtenstein only used the well-known comic book style for a few years.
The initial splendid images give way to other, more abstract paintings and sketches, of brush strokes and riffs on Cubism — many continuing to be set against a backdrop of Ben Day dots, the colored dots created by printmaker and illustrator Benjamin Day that became part of the signature Lichtenstein style. Later in his career, Lichtenstein even humorously quoted from his own work or that of colleagues; colorful depictions of living rooms later in his career boast miniature Lichtenstein or Warhol works on their walls from earlier days.
Roy Lichtenstein was born in New York in 1923 and was reared with no particular emphasis on art. He took drawing classes, however, and after service in the U.S. Army during World War II he earned a master’s in arts from The Ohio State University. His first depiction of a popular image in a painting was in 1956, when he painted a now-famous 10-dollar bill. From there, he evolved to the highly colorful cartoonlike images for which he is best known. One version of why he began to paint in newspaper comic style is that his children were small at the time and teased him, saying he could not paint as well as the images they saw in their comics.
But then, abstract expressionism, cubism, surrealism, these are all just artificial terms that some critic came up with, Brown said. “One of the problems is this whole notion that you can understand art by these group names. They have no real meaning. It’s reductive.”
Better yet, Brown said, come and visit the works and see for yourself. They push and pull, they demand and invite. And none of this comes across, she said, with a reproduction.
She likened viewing the images in person to how some people will travel miles to cast their eyes upon a fine vintage car — “There’s something very specific about the real thing,” she said.
Roy Lichtenstein: Prints 1956-1997 opens with an evening of music, dance and fun from 8 to 11 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 24. The show runs until May 7. Also showing is Kelly Mark Thanks Everyone for Everything. For more information, call 206-543-2280 or visit online at www.henryart.org.
