The National Gallery of Art is mounting a large career-spanning retrospective that begins with one of Lichtenstein's first comic-derived images - the Gallery's Look Mickey (1961). At the press preview, curators kept noting that the original image is from Donald Duck Lost and Found, a Little Golden Book from 1960, and not a comic book, but honestly that's a difference that makes no difference. Lichtenstein had come up with a hook, and a look, and together these let him break into the big time. To our eyes, familiar with almost forty years of later works, Look Mickey looks crude. The dots that texture Mickey's head and Donald's eyes are handpainted, and not made by forcing paint through a metal screen with a toothbrush as he would later turn to. The underlying pencil can be seen - something almost inconceivable in his work of just a few years later. Lichtenstein worked by doing a freehand drawing, projecting that piece onto a larger canvas and drawing it there, and then painting that. Examine this painting closely so you're prepared to see his technique evolve and tighten up as he finds his groove.
The Gallery owns 375 pieces of Lichtenstein's art -- one of the largest collections -- and this exhibit has 100 paintings, drawings and sculptures in it. They've borrowed from other museums and the show will travel to England and France after being here in DC. For comics and cartoon fans, after Look Mickey you can skip the rest of the Early Pop Art gallery, and go view the black & white drawing Alka Seltzer (1966) in the next room. To this reviewer, Jack Kirby's influence appears obvious -- and doesn't appear in the rest of the Black and White series. Kirby's Marvel Comics work had settled into its mature phase with the heavy black lines and over the top action that would typify his work. Lichtenstein's drawing of this banal subject produces a glass of Alka Seltzer that would look at home in the hands of Dr. Doom, if he ever stopped trying to conquer the world for a few minutes and looked after himself.
His decision not to do this continues to lead to headlines such as 2011's Connecting the Dots Between the Record $43 Million Lichtenstein and the $431 Comic Strip It Was Copied From, and articles that start "Imagine you drew a comic book for a nominal fee and a world-famous artist recreated in paint a panel from that work and sold it for millions of dollars without you receiving any credit or royalties." Deconstructing Roy Lichtenstein is an entire website devoted to tracking the original comic panels that Lichtenstein repurposed / appropriated for his paintings.
But in the 1990s and towards the end of his career, Lichtenstein returned to comic book art and looked back at the romance comic books he had painted from 30 years earlier -- this time, he just left off the clothing for his Nudes series. Without their captions or word balloons, and with a more radical use of dots, these paintings seem further removed from their sources than his earlier works.
A lot has been written on Lichtenstein, and I'm obviously not an expert on his work, but I do think that his 1978 Self-Portrait, in which he depicts himself as a mirror hovering above an empty shirt -- while witty -- may very well also depict a deeper ambivalence about his career.The exhibit Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective runs from October 14, 2012–January 13, 2013 at the National Gallery of Art. I can honestly recommend it to anyone interested in comic art who is willing to think about art, illustration, comics and where they all crash together. I would have preferred to see more of the original source material in the show -- only two comics panels are reproduced in the exhibit text -- and buying a 1960s DC romance comic or two wouldn't bust anyone's budget. An excellent catalog by curators James Rondeau and Sheena Wagstaff is available, and the Gallery has several events planned including ones at local restaurants Busboys and Poets and Ben's Chili Bowl.
UPDATE: Here's some pages that Lichtenstein used from Charlton and DC Comics (thanks to Prof. Witek)-
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STRANGE SUSPENSE STORIES #72 p. 25 |
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| Secret Hearts #83, Nov. 1962 |
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| All-American Men of War #90 |
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| All-American Men of War #89 |
Gordon Harris, another local comics creator, will be appearing at our Vienna store on Saturday, September 29, for his brand new graphic novel Pedestrian!
