Roy Lichtenstein, POPular Artist

Roy Lichtenstein, POPular Artist

By Libby Clay

Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol have joined their predecessors, the Abstract Expressionists, in the long corridor  outside the Grand Gallery. It is hard to miss the current pairing, “CRAK!” and the Warhol soup cans.  We are so familiar with Warhol’s work that we just nod.  But the Lichtenstein?  All those dots!  All that color.  Who is the gun-wielding girl in the yellow beret?  What does it mean?

               

Lichtenstein and Warhol paint with tongue in cheek. They are commenting, through their art, on the mass-produced images seen in advertising, TV, and, in Lichtenstein’s case, comic books. The Pop Art movement was born in London in 1955 and 1956 with a collage by British artist Richard Hamilton.  It was also beginning in the U. S. with work by Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Jim Dine, Lichtenstein and Warhol.  By 1960, Pop Art was officially part of the art scene.

               

At SUNY Oswego Lichtenstein was teacher, mentor and friend to his students, who thought of him as Roy. The Lichtensteins had a large house in Oswego and they often held Saturday-night open houses for faculty and students combined.         

A friend, George McDade, baby sat the two Lichtenstein sons on occasion.  The New Yorker arrived on Thursday and George would sit on the Lichtenstein sofa, read and watch Roy paint.  “You learn a lot watching someone work,” says George.  Roy was much disciplined, very precise. He planned a painting and made sketches beforehand. He painted quickly and had eye-hand skill.  Wife Isabel was the wage earner.  She had an interior decorating business, with clients from Chicago to France. 

               

Roy Lichtenstein was born in New York City in 1923 into an upper-middle-class family.  He attended schools there and became interested in art at the Franklin School for Boys.  After graduation he enrolled in summer classes at the Art Students League, where he worked under Reginald Marsh. He then went to Ohio State University to continue his art studies, which were interrupted by a 3-year stint in the army,

After his service, he returned to Ohio State, studying under Hoyt L. Sherman who had a significant impact on his work.  He entered the graduate program and was hired as an instructor, a post he held for ten years. He had his first on-man exhibition in New York in 1951.

               

Lichtenstein moved to Cleveland for six years and then to Oswego in 1958.  He and Isabel stayed two years in Oswego, but the hard winters made them decide to move to Rutgers University where Roy again secured a teaching position.  Originally he had painted in the abstract expressionist manner, but at Rutgers he became interested in Proto-pop imagery.  In 1961 he began his first pop paintings using cartoon images and techniques derived from the appearance of commercial printing                              Enter the Ben Day dots.

His first work to feature the dots was Look Mickey, now in the National Gallery in Washington.  This came as a challenge from one of his sons who asked him why he didn’t paint some of his heroes.  Roy obliged with Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. 

               

Leo Castelli started displaying Roy’s work in 1961, and he gave Lichtenstein his first one-man show at the gallery in 1962.  The entire collection was bought by collectors before the show even opened. 

               

Roy left Rutgers to concentrate full-time on his painting.  He used oil and Magna paint in his best-known works.  He used thick outlines, bold colors and Ben-Day dots to represent certain colors, as if reproduced by a commercial printing process.  He never took himself too seriously although he was serious about his art.  Comic books were a big influence and a source of inspiration, but he never made an attempt to copy them per se; his work came from his own ideas.

               

In addition to paintings, Roy also made sculptures in metal and plastic, including some notable public sculptures.  He continued to work until his death of pneumonia in 1997.  By all accounts, he was not only talented artistically, but was also an excellent host and a warm friend.

Ben-Day dots are a printing process named after illustrator and printer Benjamin Henry Day, Jr.  They are similar to Pointillism.  Depending on the effect, color and optical illusion needed, small colored dots are closely or widely spaced or overlapping.  1950’s and 1960’s comic books used the Ben-Day dots in the four process colors (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) to create shading and secondary colors as green, purple, orange and flesh tones.  Ben-Day dots were an inexpensive way to create the illusion of shading. You can see them in comics today, if you use a magnifying glass.  “Prince Valiant” and “Blondie” have them.  To use them, an artist would purchase a stencil or overlay sheet, available in a wide variety of sizes and spacing.  Lichtenstein exaggerated them, but painted each dot by hand, sometimes using a projector.

Offset lithography – “CRAK!” was produced this way – means that the ink is transferred to a separate surface before being applied to the paper.  The first step in offset lithography is to make a plate with the image to be printed.  If the image is in black and white, only a single plate is required because the plate can simply be inked with black.  Color images are produced using a 4-color separation process.  Four different plates area needed for the cyan. Magenta, yellow and key (black inks).  When the plates are printed, the colors blend together visually, creating a color image.  The process is fast, efficient, cheap and relatively easy.

Christie’s top sale last year was Roy Lichtenstein’s I Can See the Whole Room!...And There’s Nobody in It!  It traded hands for $43.2 million, including commission.