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ART PERIODS &
STYLES
For a review of painting styles
see: History of Art.
For profiles of art schools, see:
Modern Art Movements (1860-1970)
Contemporary Art Movements
(1970 on)
and: Timeline for History of
Art.
WORLDS TOP ARTISTS
Best Artists of All Time.
For the greatest view painters, see:
Best Landcape Artists.
For the greatest still life art, see:
Best Still Life Painters.
For the greatest portraitists
see: Best Portrait Artists.
For the greatest genre-painting, see:
Best Genre Painters.
For the top allegorical painting,
see: Best History Painters.
HIGHEST PRICED ART
For a list of the highest prices paid
for works of art by famous painters:
Most Expensive Paintings:
Top 10 and
Top 20 Most Expensive
Paintings.
For the highest earning artists of
recent times, see:
Contemporary Artists: Top
20.
WORLD'S
GREATEST ART
For a list of the finest works of
painting and sculpture, by the
world's most famous artists, see:
Greatest Paintings Ever
Oils, watercolours, mixed media
by top painters: 1300-present.
PRINTMAKING
For more about types of
fine art printing, used by
artists like Roy Lichtenstein
including engraving, etching,
lithographic and silkscreen
methods, see:
Printmaking: History, Types.
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Returning to Ohio after the war, he was
strongly influenced by one of his art tutors, Hoyt L. Sherman.
(Years later Lichtenstein was to endow a new studio at OSU which he named
the Hoyt L. Sherman Studio Art Center). On graduation, he was offered
a post as an art instructor at the University, a position he held on and
off for the next decade. In 1951, he had his first one-man show at a gallery
in New York, after which he moved to Cleveland for six years, doing odd
jobs in between spells of painting. His style of painting during these
early years could best be described as Cubist,
however on his return to New York in 1957 - where he resumed teaching
at the New York State College of Education at Oswego - he turned
to Abstract Expressionism,
producing works which impressed no one.
Then in 1960 he took up a teaching position
at Douglass College, a division of Rutgers University in
New Jersey, which brought him into contact with a fellow-teacher - the
art-theorist and performance artist
Allan Kaprow (1927-2006) - and triggered his involvement in pop-art.
Inspired by Surrealism,
contemporary artists like Robert Rauschenberg
and avant-garde forms of Conceptual art,
the basic idea behind Pop - in sharp contrast to the super-intellectualism
of Abstract Expressionism - was to create a type of art with instant
meaning. To achieve this, Pop artists explored new commercial processes,
adopting subjects, imagery and colour
schemes from easily recognizable media sources, such as consumer goods,
advertising graphics, magazines, television, and comic books. Pop artists
presented the modern world of popular culture with whatever materials
they thought appropriate, no matter how low-brow or trivial. It was high
impact modern art for Joe Public.
Lichtenstein was quickly hooked and soon
joined the cohort of aspiring Pop artists including Jim Dine, Robert
Indiana, Alex Katz, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist,
Tom Wesselmann, and Andy Warhol. He began by painting free-hand
versions of comic-strip picture frames, complete with text bubbles (eg.
"Look Mickey" 1961, National Gallery, Washington DC)
and in 1962 enjoyed a hugely successful sell-out show at Leo Castelli's
gallery in New York. Later that year his works appeared in two important
art shows held in the autumn of 1962 - one curated by Walter Hopps at
the Pasadena Art Museum ("The New Painting of Common Objects"),
the other at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York ("New Realism").
Lichtenstein took images from gum wrappers,
cartoons and comic strips (drawn originally by artists like Tony Abruzzo,
Jerry Grandinetti, Russ Heath and Irv Novick), recomposed them and then
blew up the images to a large scale, reproducing the heavy black outlines,
primary colours and benday dots of cheap printing processes.
In 1963 he produced his most famous painting
- Whaam! - a cartoon-style picture of a fighter aircraft firing
a rocket at an enemy plane complete with a vivid explosion and the caption
"I pressed the fire control... and ahead of me rockets blazed through
the sky..." Through this and other works, Lichtenstein began to achieve
worldwide attention and, arguably - along with Andy Warhol - became one
of the leading representatives of Pop art culture. If Mark
Rothko's monumental works of Abstract Expressionism were largely unknown
to the general public, almost everyone recognized Warhol's pictures of
Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, and other celebrities, and related
easily to Lichtenstein's comic-strip art. In this sense, both artists
exemplified the new movement's avowed intent to reject the elitist character
of traditional, high-brow art in favour of populist pictures of well-known
subjects. As Lichtenstein himself said: "art is all around us."
In the mid-sixties he began creating Pop
versions of paintings by modern masters, including Paul Cezanne (1839-1906)
and Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), and started screenprinting. In the seventies
he expanded his range to include sculpture, most often in polished brass
in the Art Deco style
of the 1930s. In addition he completed a number of composite works such
as "Artist's Studio, Look Mickey" (1973, Walker Art Centre,
Minneapolis), dabbled with surrealism in works like "Pow Wow"
(1979, Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst,Aachen) and designed
a range of ceramic tableware. His later work featured several large-scale
commissions for public places (eg. Lamp in St. Mary’s, Georgia).
In 1989, at Christie's
sale of contemporary art in New York, Lichtenstein's painting "Torpedo...Los!"
sold for $5.5 million - a record for the artist.
In 1996, Lichtenstein gifted a total of
154 prints to The National Gallery in Washington DC, which thus became
the largest single repository of his work. He died of pneumonia at New
York University Medical Center in September 1997.
Artistic Legacy
Even if the subject matter of his art was
essentially trivial, and borrowed heavily from both existing imagery and
commercial printing techniques, Lichtenstein undoubtedly made a huge contribution
to contemporary art. His innovative
use of populist iconography to broaden the meaning
and definition of art, and his palette of primary colours to create
powerful images, is as relevant and meaningful to the development of visual
creativity as any Picasso or Renoir. Indeed, in comparison with many examples
of late-20th century postmodernism,
his paintings look positively conservative!
Works by Roy Lichtenstein can be seen in
many of the best art museums, including
the National
Gallery of Art Washington DC.
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