Jackson Pollock became famous after an article ran in Life magazine under the headline, “Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?” The headline, accompanied by indelible photos of the artist and his work, invited two types of responses: You must be kidding and If he is, wow—things are about to get interesting.
That was August 1949. By the early ’60s, Pollock was no longer around, but modern art in America had indeed become interesting. Money was rolling in. Collectors competed for the latest groundbreaking work. The public’s interest was piqued. So Life commissioned an article on another artist, Roy Lichtenstein. The headline it ran under, with Lichtenstein’s approval, was: “Is He the Worst Artist in the U.S.?”
Life published the profile in 1964, a couple years after Lichtenstein’s first exhibition of Pop-style paintings at Leo Castelli’s New York gallery. That show made a cause célѐbre of Lichtenstein. It included painted reproductions of a magnified comic-strip scene (Blam) and radically distilled, deadpan renderings of a washing machine, a turkey, an engagement ring, and a laughing cat (later acquired by Andy Warhol).
Once the Life article was published, Lichtenstein’s prices shot up. Controversy fueled his fame. Some people, such as the critic Otto Hahn, praised his work for imbuing “monstrously tasteless imagery” with “tragic, anonymous grandeur.” Others thought him a copycat and questioned whether he was an artist at all.
The Castelli show has been faithfully duplicated, down to the lighting fixtures and parquet floor, inside “Roy Lichtenstein: Like New,” an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Organized by the Whitney curator Meg Onli and the artist Alex da Corte, it’s the first retrospective devoted to Lichtenstein in New York in 33 years.
Today, Lichtenstein’s distinctive visual idiom—comic-book brevity given the high-art treatment—is as synonymous with postwar Pop art as Warhol’s soup cans and celebrity screen prints. His Ben Day–like dots and speech bubbles are copied on bedsheets, handbags, Band-Aids, and billboards. The Whitney show is an opportunity to ask whether the paintings themselves hold up in the face of this 65-year storm of reproduction and commerce. Any answer is going to be moderated by irony, precisely because the paintings gained their original frisson from looking like commodities and copies.
Lichtenstein’s zippy humor is suggested by his embrace of the Life article headline. It’s clear from other stories too. In 1965, for instance, the artist and his future wife, Dorothy Herzka, showed up at a Halloween party dressed as Warhol and Edie Sedgwick. It was a good gag—both visually (look at the photo and you could swear it was them) and conceptually: Warhol and Lichtenstein were by then the two leading figures of the growing Pop-art movement and well known for their interest in duplication.
[Read: Why is Warhol still so famous?]
Like Warhol, Lichtenstein was savvy about how, after Pollock, the currency of notoriety operated in America’s art world. While the Life profile was being prepared, he painted the hilarious Image Duplicator. It shows a cartoon villain—surely a coded self-portrait—in close-up, his evil blue eyes, blond eyebrows, and red mask overlaid by a speech bubble: WHAT? WHY DID YOU ASK THAT? WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT MY IMAGE DUPLICATOR?
Lichtenstein was not just being droll. He was fascinated by the implications of duplication. In 1961, he made two near-identical portraits showing a generic man wearing a bow tie. He titled one Portrait of Allan Kaprow and the other Portrait of Ivan Karp. But in reality, Kaprow and Karp, both friends of Lichtenstein, looked nothing alike. What, he seemed to be asking, is gained when we duplicate or mechanically reproduce something, and what is lost?
The Whitney show’s title comes from another peculiar exercise in duplication: a 1962 pencil drawing titled Like New. The work, for all its modesty, is at once funny and slyly philosophical, and a reminder that Lichtenstein was as much a conceptualist and minimalist as a Pop celebrant.
Lichtenstein made Like New during his breakthrough years, when he rendered common objects—an electrical cord, a hot dog, a notebook, a tire—in a style borrowed from mass-media reproductions. (“I’m never drawing the object itself,” Lichtenstein explained. “I’m only drawing a depiction of the object—a kind of crystallized symbol of it.”)
Like New shows two grids, side by side. The wall label says they represent window screens, but they’re really just pencil lines forming tight grids. The taut verticals and horizontals on the left are broken near the center, their loose ends turning wavy and stray, like the strings of a tennis racket smashed over a pole. The screen on the right has been restored to its immaculate, unified state—like new.
Was Lichtenstein mocking America’s dream of repair? Was he questioning the ability of consumer society to “make it new”—to restore order and harmony and fix what was broken? These questions feel too big for such a humble work. The Second World War, though, was not so far in the past. Lichtenstein, who had been drafted into the Army in 1943 and deployed to Europe, was discharged in 1946. Fifteen years later, the economy was booming and households were filling with products. But the new consumerism, Lichtenstein seemed to suggest, was a fragile scrim over a moral and spiritual void.
Decades earlier, between the world wars, the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke had lamented to a friend the loss of a depth of meaning that he associated with handmade objects passed down from one generation to the next, each with their own history of use, care, and repair. “Now, from America,” he complained, “empty indifferent things are pouring across, sham things, dummy life.”
Lichtenstein, almost 40 years later, was conscious not just of objects pouring out of factories but also of the way that people’s desire for such objects was manufactured by advertising. He wanted to portray, he said, “the lack of sensibility, the lack of refinement, the kind of immediate, not contemplative answer that society keeps giving us.” Portraying is crucially different from critiquing: Lichtenstein’s paintings deliberately lacked signs of “sensibility.” They were as vacant and affectless as a showroom washing machine. But they may be more contemplative than they appear.
Lichtenstein, who loved to read Scientific American, was fascinated by systems of visual perception. As a student at Ohio State University, he had been heavily influenced by Hoyt Sherman, a fine-arts professor who taught classes in perceptual training. (Along with co-curating the show, Da Corte, one of the most compelling artists working today, has created a short film about Sherman, casting himself as the professor, which is screening in the show’s opening gallery.)
The secret of visual perception, for Sherman, had nothing to do with the thing you were looking at. Instead, as Lichtenstein explained, it was about “building a unified pattern of seeing.” To develop perceptual skills, Sherman would place students in a dark room that he called a “flash lab.” He would abruptly turn the lights on and off and, after the room returned to darkness, make students draw what they had seen. He was teaching them to find unities, to register what it is that holds the visual field together.
[Read: The artist who ripped up the rules of drawing]
Outside of the flash lab, the surest way for an artist to achieve unity on paper or canvas is to convert the visual field into units of, for instance, cross-hatching, dashes, or dots. But when you convert visual phenomena into a system of fungible units, something is gained and something lost. The world becomes, as Da Corte suggests in the exhibition catalog, like a sponge, or like Swiss cheese: conceptually unified but slightly less substantial than it had been.
Is anything about this sounding familiar?
In 1966, Lichtenstein compared his dots to digital technologies, suggesting that his paintings possessed a “data information quality.” Two years later, he began work on a series of five panels inspired by Claude Monet’s more than two dozen paintings of Rouen Cathedral from the early 1890s. Lichtenstein’s gambit was to reduce Monet’s thickly encrusted, opalescent paint to two-color combinations of mechanical dots. The resulting patterns, up close, seem abstract and insubstantial. At a distance, however, they resolve, like Monet’s paintings, into the cathedral facades.
Cezanne famously said of Monet that he was “only an eye—but, my God, what an eye.” What Sherman and then Lichtenstein understood was that we are never “only an eye.” Eyes are attached to brains and bodies, which continually mediate raw perception. (When we open our eyes, the brain’s first task is to overturn a law of optics: The flow of images coming in through the eyes is upside down.)
We see the world, moreover, through a changing set of conventions. Human technologies—from oil paint and printmaking to photography and the computer—all establish new conventions that affect how we perceive the world. These conventions can be useful, even delightful; but they act like veils between us and reality, often hardening into clichés, tired from overuse.
Modernism’s project was to see the world afresh by disrupting convention and stripping away clichés. As technologies advanced, modern artists sensed something broken about our connection to reality. They wanted to establish less secondhand ways of perceiving. Many of their attempts were concerned with fixing what was broken and reestablishing a sense of spiritual wholeness.
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Lichtenstein’s interest in Monet was far from arbitrary. The Impressionists—the first modernists—had disrupted traditional pictorial conventions by dispensing with drawing, tone, narrative, and expression and funneling all the many facets of perception through a single lens: colored light. This was how they established their new, reparative unity.
After them, Georges Seurat and his pointillist followers unified their pictures by converting Impressionist light into a scientific system of atomized color relations. Piet Mondrian—another modernist Lichtenstein thought hard about—took this principle further. He converted the visible world into a grid, a binary system of rectilinear divisions of space and primary colors.
Lichtenstein shared the early-modernist impulse to “make it new.” But he was working in an era marked by rampant consumerism and accelerating technologies of reproduction. These technologies had long prehistories, going back to intaglio and halftone printing, which built up images with sophisticated patterns of dots, and then to such innovations as the Ben Day dot system, invented in 1879 by Benjamin Henry Day Jr., and later adapted by Lichtenstein.
Another technology, the Xerox machine, was released in 1959. When, two years later, Disney made One Hundred and One Dalmatians, this new image duplicator helped replicate animators’ drawings, and soon, according to Da Corte, scores had lost their jobs. Handmade drawing was replaced by mechanical reproduction.
Of course, one way to contend with technology’s veils is to tear them down. Pablo Picasso was thinking along these lines when he described his pictures as “a sum of destructions.” Another way is simply to draw attention to them—perhaps by repeating them over and over, as when you repeat a word until it becomes absurd or takes on an entirely different meaning.
Lichtenstein’s project was more in the second category. Through sustained visual panache and persistent, peppy wit, he helped mid-century America see itself. There’s a reason his work slides happily into the key of today: The conventions and technologies governing our reality have only become more fungible, the answers to our questions more standardized and ironed out. If his proliferating dots create a scrim of reality analogous to Swiss cheese, he sensitizes us to the holes—perhaps with what Elias Canetti had in mind when he wrote: “The hopeful things in any system are the things that have been left out.”
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