Ironic observer
Andrew Lambirth
Roy Lichtenstein Haywaal Ciallety, until 16 May
The whole of the Hayward Gallery has been given over to a retrospective exhibition of that American Pop master Roy Lichtenstein (1923-97), the first sizeable show of his work in Britain for 35 years. Famed for his brash images of fighting war planes — `Whaami' has been in the Tate collection since 1966 — and all-American girls on romantic dates, Lichtenstein monumentalised the modern myths of popular culture. Was he responsible merely for glamorising the tawdry and violent? Here is a welcome chance to assess his unique contribution.
The subtitle of the accompanying catalogue (available in hardback at a special exhibition price of f19.95) is 'All About Art'. I wonder if the powers that be thought that this as an exhibition title would confuse the public, and so reduced the show's label simply to the artist's name. A pity really — 'All About Art' is a good description of what Lichtenstein actually painted. He was a highly sophisticated and intellectual artist, who raided art history for his parodies — quoting from the ancients as much as from Cubism — not simply the man who copied cartoons and advertising imagery. And a measure of his very real success is how much, to my surprise, I enjoyed the exhibition.
I thought I'd seen it all before, that the show would be a weary repetition of familiar images, worn at least a little thread bare. Instead, I was enthralled by the sustained originality and unfading classicism of Lichtenstein's vision. As others have noted, Lichtenstein is an artist in the tradition of Chardin and Poussin, which is not what one necessarily expects from a maker of Pop images of Mickey Mouse and cheesecake. He always claimed to be more abstract than those painters who were avowedly non-representational, for his work is solely concerned with formal values, with organising his raw material of dots and outlines and flat colours into superbly composed static designs. The artist remains detached from his subject matter, his stance ironic. He is consciously making art about art, even when the source 'art' derives from such lowly forms as comic books or bubble-gum wrappers. The banality is deliberate.
The exhibition opens with 'Look Mickey', a bold, stark, cartoon image complete with speech bubble. It dates from 1961, the year Lichtenstein found his voice, having previously scrabbled about teaching and working as an engineering draughtsman, graphic designer and window-dresser. In contrast, nearby hang three 1958 India ink drawings of Disney characters — Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Bugs Bunny — executed in a not-ineffective splashy Abstract Expressionist style. The Lichtenstein style we know and love seems to have come ready-made, as it were, out of the blue. How did he arrive at this radical new departure?
Of course the hidden process of artistic development had been more gradual, and as early as 1953 Lichtenstein had begun to include material from printed advertisements in his pictures. The culture of consamerkm was booming. and the artist was alert to his role as dowsing rod to the zeitgeist. Lichtenstein's earlier training as technical draughtsman and graphic artist gave him the entrée into industrial printing techniques, and he soon adopted the process of Benday dot half-tone screens, enlarging them to exaggerate the dots, which became an instantly recognisable feature of his distinctive style. Interestingly, one or two of the early pictures are relatively untouched by the Benday treatment — for instance, the iconic image of spinach-muscled Popeye, or the straightforward depiction of a steaming cup of coffee — and they look almost innocent for it. It is as if by deliberately showing in his paintings how newsprint images are made up of dots, Lichtenstein became at once knowing and cool, the ironic observer rather than the involved consumer.
In some of these early images — of a golf ball or a large spool like an upended flowerpot — Lichtenstein seems closest to our home-grown star Pop artist, Patrick Caulfield (born 1936). There's the same deadpan intensity and implied humour, but Lichtenstein was determined to augment the artificiality of his images, and took stylisation to unprecedented heights with his screens of dots. It is that extreme distancing which renders Lichtenstein's pictures so impersonal — a characteristic thankfully not shared by Caulfield.
Lichtenstein is particularly effective in black-and-white and when dealing with still-life — his 'Ball of Twine', 'Bathroom' and 'Radio' (with real leather strap and aluminium stripping) are more satisfying to my eye than close-ups of vacuous faces. But what a witty and intelligent artist he was. Some of the best images are simply of large, dripping brushstrokes, surely the most succinct critiques of Abstract Expressionism ever. And upstairs are three landscapes of consummate wit and daring, including one of Sussex downland. (Lichtenstein was briefly in England on military service during the war.) Compositionally, the paintings did get rather too involved in the 1970s, relying heavily on patterning for its own sake, and the eloquent clarity of the earlier work is often submerged. And if some of his later oriental paraphrases didn't quite work, at least one, entitled 'Tall Mountains', is a triumph of understatement.
Although the show extends throughout the Hayward, it is not densely hung, and there are some 80 exhibits, a comfortable number. It's easy to write off Lichtenstein as repetitive and one-track, but that would be untrue. This exhibition ably demonstrates his range of subject and his stylistic evolution. Admittedly his paintings don't take a lot of looking at, so this is a fairly swift exhibition to view, but none the worse for that.
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