Artist 101

1.

Beginnings

Born in 1923, Lichtenstein grew up in New York City with a passion for science and comic books. He began his studies at the city’s Parsons School of Design in 1937 and went on to the Art Students League, studying under American Realist Reginald Marsh. Later, following military service in World War II, he attended Ohio State and studied art under the G.I. Bill.

While pursuing art-adjacent career trajectories including teaching and window decorating, a zest for boundary-pushing creativity was a constant companion for Lichtenstein.

The artist’s early work drew whimsically on American folklore, characters from medieval narratives and fused earlier movements with modernism. He had his first solo exhibition in 1951, a period when his work was fluctuating between Cubism and Expressionism. While artists like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Franz Kline were in the throes of the nominally ‘serious’ New York School of Abstract Expressionism, concealed within Lichtenstein’s brushy, abstract works were iconic cartoon characters such as Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny and Donald Duck – a taste of what was to come.

In the early 1960s, Lichtenstein began finding his rhythm. Alongside the likes of Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Claes Oldenburg, he became a leading figure in a new art movement known as Pop Art.

Lichtenstein’s sharp-edged, accessible characters rendered in Ben-Day dots arrived for the first time in Look Mickey (1961). Then came solitary domestic objects such as sneakers, hot dogs, and golf balls. Later, emotionally charged comic narratives began to surface: bold images of war, and impassioned romance and heartbreak. Lichtenstein had his first exhibit of comic-book paintings at Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in 1962, a show that prompted almost instant notoriety and commercial success.

2.

The Language of Pop Art

Lichtenstein found international acclaim by inventing his own dialect within the Pop Art movement. His experiments with commercial advertising imagery began in the 1940s when he appropriated motifs from comics and the media. This work, though gathering popular appeal from mass audiences, was not welcomed with open arms by all. Some critics viewed it as superficial, unoriginal and trivial, and Lichtenstein as a copyist. In reality, his work was as much an invention as an imitation, a meticulously manual process of borrowing and re-interpreting that the art world had never before seen.

His breakthrough came with works such as Drowning Girl and Crying Girl (both 1963) – satirical takes on the melodramatic pulp fiction of the era.

With the late 1960s came Lichtenstein’s first museum surveys: a travelling retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1967, his first European survey the following year at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and in 1969, his first New York retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

While Abstract Expressionists were priding themselves on inaccessible thought and non-verbal passions and desires, Lichtenstein was busy inventing his own language. Text itself played a key role: speech bubbles, and capitalised exclamations accompanied the deadpan expressions on the faces of his subjects.

Arguably the artist's most celebrated work is a large, two-canvas painting from 1963, which incorporates both a speech bubble and diagonally stacked lettering. As a plane explodes dramatically on the right-hand panel, fragmented, diagonal letters quote the work’s onomatopoeic title, ‘WHAAM!’.

3.

Process

Lichtenstein’s ultra-stylised, flat and often large-scale paintings simultaneously documented and parodied their subjects. Beyond cartoons, comics and advertising, the artist’s interest in reproducing existing imagery also extended to masterpieces by Masters such as Picasso, Cézanne, Mondrian and Monet.

The artist used perforated templates and screen-printing to replicate and exaggerate the dot patterning synonymous with commercial printing. These Ben-Day dots – a format used by newspapers and comic strips to inexpensively denote gradients and texture - would become his stock-in-trade, a fusion of hard-edged industrial reproduction and hand-rendered fine art painting. Rather than use offset printing (which would have produced a Ben-Day dot naturally) he created Ben-Day dots – a signature motif that would follow the artist throughout his career.

Using oil and Magna (early acrylic) paint, Lichtenstein’s colour palette was almost exclusively primary: highly saturated and contrasting blocks of colour that omitted details and created a stark optical impact.

In later work, the artist moved beyond the bounds of the canvas, and a primary palette when he created murals and other major public commissions.

4.

Ideas

Lichtenstein’s early Pop paintings borrowed and paraphrased cartoon imagery and drew on advertising aesthetics – a reference to the post-war explosion of mass consumerism and ubiquitous visual commercialism.

In the mid-1960s, he began parodying not only the cartoon and commercial worlds but also the clichés of high art. In works such as Brushstroke, (1965), he put his own ironic spin on the gestural motions so prevalent – and sacred – in Abstract Expressionism. Isolated and contrived, he turned mark-making into something deconstructed, reproducible and entirely devoid of human expression. As the artist once put it: ‘I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me.’

An unexpected change in direction came in 1964 when Lichtenstein pivoted to sculpture. Though the idea of three-dimensions seemed to contradict the sheer, relentless flatness of his paintings, he somehow managed to retain horizontality in later works such as the bronze sculpture El Cap de Barcelona, 1992.

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5.

Legacy

Lichtenstein industrialised Impressionism, suppressed Expressionism and turned high and low art inside out. His work will forever be known for tensions that seem to coexist: emotion and artificiality; manual and mechanical production; fine art and mass consumerism. Few artists can claim to have ushered in post-modernism with an entirely distinctive approach.

The artist’s market remains consistent and his work coveted. His paintings are found in some of the most prestigious museum collections in the world. These include the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, Museum Ludwig in Cologne and Tate Modern in London.

Also a prolific maker of editions and multiples, Lichtenstein remains one of the most appreciated artists of the 20th century. His legacy is palpable in the work of contemporary art superstars such as KAWS and Banksy, who frequently employ cartoon imagery and embrace populism to epic success.

Generations of collectors who grew up in the heyday of Pop Art are now seeking the work of younger artists who exhibit parallels with the famous, and infamous ‘class of 1960’ – Lichtenstein’s legacy as a principal Pop Art Old Master remains mighty.