POP'S MOST POPULAR
By ROBERT HUGHES
Roy Lichtenstein, who died at 73 last week of complications arising from pneumonia, was not quite the most famous of the American Pop artists. That honor belonged to Andy Warhol, who made it somewhat dubious. Lichtenstein was always lower-key as a person, reserved, wryly courteous and not a great believer in the virtues of publicity. He neither sought nor avoided the limelight.
Born in New York City in 1923, Lichtenstein served a stint in the Air Force during World War II--which must have laid the ground of his later comic-strip images of gung-ho pilots blasting their enemies from the sky--and then, after studying art at Ohio State University, moved back East. He was a slender, elegant man who, with his beaky nose and long gray hair pulled back in a ponytail, acquired in his later years an odd physical resemblance to Georgia O'Keeffe. He lived for his work, assiduously producing it on a near industrial scale--sculpture, prints, big murals, even a hull decoration for an America's Cup yacht--never making inflated claims for it, never posing as a maestro. The humor of his art came from a natural sweetness of temperament.
His breakthrough came with his first show at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1962. Before long his work, as distinct from his personal "image," was the most popular of any Pop artist's. You could pick out his style underwater or a mile away, and it had none of the morbid undercurrent of Warhol's. It was its own logo. It fairly crackled with assertion and impersonality, both at once. Those Benday dots, that studied neutrality of surface, that not-so-simple love of a vernacular (romance and action comics of the '50s) that was already receding into nostalgia when Lichtenstein took it up in the '60s--whom else could it have belonged to?
Lichtenstein became known to an enormous public as "the guy who paints comics," but in fact the comic-strip phase of his work was quite brief: it lasted from 1961 to 1965, after which he moved on to other subjects and themes. The motif caused considerable offense, to the point where LIFE magazine nominated him as the worst artist in the world. But it enabled him to play with all manner of saucy ironies and In jokes, and in any case he never copied anything; each image underwent fastidious tweaking, reshaping and restyling. "Why, Brad darling, this painting is a masterpiece!" a blond woman exclaims to a clean-cut young painter in Masterpiece, 1962. "My, soon you'll have all of New York clamoring for your work!" Neither she nor Lichtenstein, at the time, knew how right she was.
What was he into? A game of displacement, often deeper than it seemed. At the time when Lichtenstein and his co-conspirators arrived on the scene, a sort of academy of spontaneity had formed in New York. Painters all over America had deduced from Abstract Expressionism that art, to be sincere, must be thick and splashy, so that the galleries were full of conventional signs for unconvention. A postmodernist before the term got going, Lichtenstein realized that in art, though style may not be everything, everything is style: every kind of image comes to us packaged in terms that inexorably turn into conventions. He was antinuance, antiheroism, antiexistentialist. With good humor and icy elegance, coupled with a genuine liking for his low-art or no-art sources in American vernacular, Lichtenstein was able to construct an art that approached real monumentality on the foundation of images that bien pensant taste regarded as trash.
That art could be beautiful when dealing with neutral subjects, such as in the Mirror series, 1969-72. When he turned to high-art ones (his pastiches of Picasso, Cezanne, Balla, Matisse and so on), he could wittily run variations on art-history classics without mocking the seriousness of his sources. He brought them down a bit, without malice, just as he raised the comics a bit, without condescension. He looked vulgar 35 years ago; today you see his dandy's taste almost before you see the painting.