grand daddy of POP

If you have not yet seen the Lichtenstein retro at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art I strongly recommend to go and see the show. Here is a well curated retrospective of one of the masters of pop art. When I saw the show I instantly remembered many of the pieces on display - they were kind of burned into my retina - just like you can burn a picture into the imaging surface of a video camera. It might have been many years since some of Lichtenstein's trade-mark images were pinned as posters onto the walls of my student appartment in Berlin but the SFMoMA show was proof that these icons of modern American art never lost their appeal and freshness.



What makes Lichtenstein's work so interesting in hindsight is that he succeeded to investigate the world of printed dots and continued to come up with novel images. His visual laboratory straddled the language of the comic strip and simultanously, the formal building blocks of offset printing. One being the narrative medium of the entertainment section of the American newspaper, the other the techical foundation on which the wide dissimination of this mass medium rested... and from which it derived its immense popularity.

It is noteworthy that Lichtenstein discovered the raster dots in primary colors at a time when the supercharged electrons of TV had already started to replace the newspaper as the leading medium of the day. The beginning demise of this 19th century mass medium kicked in the stellar career of what became one of the grandmasters of pop art.

Lichtenstein had started his path into the world's museums and numerous privat collections in the early 60s with a couple of relatively small paintings starring Donald Duck, a piece of soap, a bathing beauty and other illustrious themes. He rapidly developed his personal style - based on extremly generic techiques and iconic "Versatzstuecken" found in art, advertising, and popular media- and created his landmark paintings of love and despair and the fascinating firepower of modern war machines.


Roy Lichtenstein in front of his paintings (early 70's?)

It could have been the beginning and end of a one-time-wonder, like the musicians who come up with their one and only Number One Hit Single, only to be forced to endlessly repeat this one hit for the rest of their artistic life. Instead, with a clever turn Lichtenstein started to apply his signature style to the entire arsenal the history of painting had been building up over the centuries: in quick succession he came up with Monet's and nudes, cubist still-lifes and abstract color strokes. Finally, he was bold enough to add his own interpretations of Chinese scroll landscapes to the international canon of art. I had the luck of seeing his "Chinese" landscapes at the Smithsonian Museum of Asian-American Art juxtaposed with the ancient originals. The Lichtenstein "copies" worked extremly well in this environment. I was happy to revisit a few of these fantastic paintings at the show in San Francisco. Again, I found the contrast between the vast mountainous countrysides and the tiny little people lost in it truely amazing.

Two quick remarks in closing. Unfortunately, an exhibition of Lichtenstein's prints held in December at the Meyerovich Gallery is already over (with their web site still open!). It was a nice show of late prints, most pretty big, trying hard to be like paintings and as such too fakey for my taste. While you missed this show you will have the chance of getting another view at the museum building itself, an architectural marvel which is celebrating its 10th anniversary in these days. The first ten years demonstrate that Italian Swiss architect Mario Botta - who was in town last week - created a stunning and visually challenging environment to display contemporary art. It's fun to visit again and again and it's probably even more fun to hang as a painting on such spectacular walls! I am sure the Lichtenstein's are having a Great Time here!