Lichtenstein's Paradox

Lichtenstein’s Paradox: A Collision of High and Low Art

Throughout his artistic career Roy Lichtenstein explored various was to combine high and low art as a way of deconstructing and complicating various types of visual language. He is most widely known for pieces like Whaam! (1963) or Drowning Girl (1963) in which he took panels from war or romance comics and reproduced them on large canvases using oil on canvas. These pieces were instantly popular and became iconic of Lichtenstein’s style. Less well known are Lichtenstein’s reproductions, in his commercialized style, of famous paintings by modernist painters such as Picasso, Monet, and Léger. While the method of production, and resulting stylized graphic imagery, remains the same for reproductions of comic book panels and modernist paintings alike, the source material for his paintings comes from completely opposite ends of the artistic spectrum. This makes sense when Litchensutein’s art is viewed through the lens of his desire to explore the future and nature of fine art in an age of mechanical reproduction and an oversimplified commercial visual language. On one hand he explored the possibilities of elevating the visual language of comic books and advertising to the status of fine art, thereby breaking down artificial distinctions and problematizing nature of commercial art and the role of the “fine artist”. On the other, he explored the possibilities of commercializing fine art by reproducing paintings by modernist masters in a simplified, mechanical, graphic style that resulted in a flat echo of the original. This exhibit pairs the original source paintings with Litchensutein’s commercialized interpretation in order to give the viewer the opportunity to contemplate the nature and meaning of Liechtenstein’s various translations and reproductions.

Three Musicians | Fernand Léger | 1944 | Oil on Canvas | MoMA 334.1955

The French artists Fernand Léger, who almost died of mustard gas in the trenches of WWI, was heavily influenced by Picasso’s analytic cubism which dominated his style for much of his career. Three Musicians is Léger’s response to a painting of the same title by Picasso in 1921. Picasso’s painting, a prime example of his later synthetic cubism, shows three simplified abstract figures in bright colors in a frontal pose holding musical instruments. Léger responded to synthetic cubism by adopting a primitivist approach that combined conceptual figures and simplified features with primary colors and thick black outlines. This artistic approach was inspirational to Lichtenstein who saw in Léger an idealogical connection between cubism and pop art. 

Stepping Out | Roy Lichtenstein | 1978 | Oil and Manga on Canvas | MET 1980.420

The two figures in this painting, while being united by large flat areas of yellow and blue, are differentiated by the geometry of the shapes used to construct their figures. The woman on the left is composed mostly of rectangles and the shading, created with Lichtenstein’s signature Ben Day dots, adds an illusion of volume that is purely formal, as is the case with Picasso and Baroque’s analytic cubism. The figure on the right is a mirror image of a figure from Three Musicians by Léger. Lichtenstein admired Léger for his simplified figures, use of primary colors, and strong black outlines which prefigured Lichtenstein’s own work.

Dora Maar Au Chat | Pablo Picasso | 1941 | Oil on Canvas | Private Collection

This painting is the most well known of a series of paintings that Picasso made of the photographer Dora Maar while they were living together during the early 1940’s. In it, Maar is seated in a frontal pose with both hands resting on the arms of the wooden chair transforming it into her throne and her flower bedecked hat becomes her her crown. She seems serene and regal, almost religious like a modern madonna brining the viewer somehow closer to God.  Picasso also used a bright color pallet, accentuating the highlights and shadows in her face with red and bright green. 

Woman With Flowered Hat | Roy Lichtenstein | 1963 | Oil and Manga on Canvas | Collection of Laurence Graff

In this painting Lichtenstein creates a streamlined parody of a famous Picasso painting of his lover Dora Maar. When compared with the source, it is interesting to note that Lichtenstein has in some sense “corrected” Picasso by creating a more realistic skin tone using a half-tone of red Ben Day dots and a more palpable hair color by adding yellow. This type of insensitive reproduction illustrated what Lichtenstein saw as America’s commercial visual language’s tendency toward brutal oversimplification. It also begs the question, what happens to a transformative work of art when it is reinterpreted so as to be publicly acceptable, or what happens to it when it can be reproduced mechanically en masse? 

Rouen Cathedral: The Portal (Sunlight) | Claude Monet | 1894 | Oil on Canvas | MET 30.95.250

Monet painted more than thirty views of Rouen Cathedral in 1892–93. In these paintings he recorded the effects produced by changes in light due to time of day and particular season of the year. In this way the subject, in this case Rouen Cathedral, plays second fiddle to the real focus of the series which is light itself and how its various fluctuations can drastically change the perception of various objects or even an object’s mood. Due to his desire to quickly capture the essence of the scene, Monet used thick layers of paint in quick strokes that give these paintings a clear sense of texture and physicality while simultaneously eventuating the artist’s subjective application of paint to canvas. 

Rouen Cathedral, Set 5 | Roy Lichtenstein | 1969 | Oil and Manga on Canvas | SFMoMA 92.266

This series of paintings, which Lichtenstein based on Monet’s series, are unique in that they are created exclusively through the application of various colored Ben Day dots. By choosing this method of reproduction, Lichtenstein highlights the way in which the viewer’s eye makes sense of the subject using the approximation of light and shadow achieved by the duo tone dots on the white canvas. This is a mechanical method that parodies Monet’s original interest in painting the impression of light on the eyes and approximating that process by painting exclusively in small splotches of color.  Lichtenstein’s interpretation is full of irony as well as an awareness of the artist’s place in art history.