Roy Lichtenstein: Like New

Meg Onli: Welcome to Roy Lichtenstein: Like New. I’m Meg Onli. I’m the Nancy and Fred Poses Curator here at the Whitney Museum, and I’m one of the co-curators on this exhibition. What is greeting you as you get off the elevators is a 96-foot mural re-created by hand. The work is called Greene Street Mural, and it was originally painted by Roy Lichtenstein and his team in 1983 at Leo Castelli’s recently—at the time—opened gallery on Greene Street, which is where the title is coming from.

There’s a story that goes, Leo Castelli brought Roy Lichtenstein into this early Greene Street space as it was being renovated. And he said, “Roy, look at the space. Do something.” And Lichtenstein said, “I don’t know, Leo. The space is huge. I’m not really sure what I would do.” And they walk around the space together. And at some point Lichtenstein says, “I guess I’m going to have to use everything I’ve ever painted to fill this space.” And he says, “Aha, that’s what I'll do.”

Narrator: The result was like a kind of retrospective of Lichtenstein’s work—but not a traditional story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. For Onli and her co-curator, artist Alex Da Corte, that made it a perfect work to put at the beginning of this exhibition. 

Meg Onli: I think for many people, we’ve understood Lichtenstein as a style. You understand that he is working with Ben-Day dots, bold outlines; all of those things are represented here. But I think one of the things that is often overlooked is that Lichtenstein himself was really interested in the reuse of his own images, the remixing of his own images, and the circulation of his own images. But we’ve also made our own intervention for the very first time into Greene Street Mural.

Narrator: Those interventions are embedded in glass cases in the mural’s surface. They contain some of Lichtenstein’s drawings, and other works showing his process. 

Meg Onli: You have a chance to see this tension between the process in which he was making these small, meticulous drawings that are very much hand drawn, and then you have this mural that is emphatically handmade while also at the same time deceivingly sort of looking like vinyl.

Alex Da Corte: When looking at Image Duplicator, one wouldn't first think of it as a self-portrait. And yet it has long been considered one of Roy Lichtenstein's self-portraits.

Narrator: Alex Da Corte is an artist based in Philadelphia, and the co-curator of this exhibition. He’s also made new works of his own for the show, exploring throughlines in Lichtenstein’s art and thought that feel productive today–more than sixty years after the creation of paintings like this one.

Alex Da Corte: What you see when you look at this painting is a person in a panic asking about their image duplicator–“my image duplicator.” In an interview with John Coplans, Roy Lichtenstein said, "I want my painting to look as if it's programmed. And what better representation of a programmed painting is a painting about an “image duplicator?” A painting about a machine that makes images on its own without the need for a human hand. And what a prescient thing to say at a time when in post-war America, things were being made in the multiple, en masse, by machines. There was still an artist who was interested in where these images came from, and interested in communing with how they were made, even if it meant painting them by hand, dot by dot–only to say that the hand still matters.

Alex Da Corte: Tire for me is a curious painting because it is immobile. 

Narrator: Artist and curator Alex Da Corte.

Alex Da Corte: And tires move, and tires make marks. And this is a painting of a tire or a proposition for an object that would make marks or could make marks. And indeed, when you look at the painting, it is in a void on a white ground, and there are treads that are clear and still.

Narrator: Lichtenstein’s approach to art was profoundly shaped by his time at Ohio State University. 

Alex Da Corte: Ohio is the rubber capital of the world. And Akron, Ohio, is a great producer of tires, specifically tires made and painted by an artist named June Adair Black, who was a tire sculptress and made the tire treads for a lot of the tire makers of the time, Goodyear and Firestone. When I look at Tire, I think it's a consideration of these kinds of makers, the kind of invisible marks one leaves from moving through the world, be it in a car or by foot. We leave histories, we leave traces of ourselves. And I believe that for Roy, that was of great interest to him where he situated himself between the handmade and the machine-made.

Avis Berman: For such a deceptively simple-looking work, the Portrait of Madame Cézanne is densely layered and its roots are connected to Lichtenstein’s own past as an artist. 

Narrator: Avis Berman, Lichtenstein’s biographer. 

Avis Berman: To define the appearance of the picture, it's a black-and-white rendering of a line drawing by the artist and teacher Erle Loran who wrote a much reprinted book titled Cézanne's Composition. The diagram is an outline of one of the twenty-seven portraits that [Paul] Cézanne painted of his wife, Hortense. So this painting is not from Cézanne at all. It’s from an illustration by Loran for his book. And Lichtenstein—and this was his word—described it as “silly” because the diagram seemed to be in complete opposition to the feeling that Cézanne wanted to convey and communicate. There was no color. There was no texture. There was no shading. Now, Lichtenstein also quoted Cézanne saying, “The outline escapes me.” And here Lichtenstein said, “Here was the diagram of a Cézanne with very hard and heavy outlines.” So he wanted to satirize it. 

The artists Lichtenstein most revered were Cézanne, [Pablo] Picasso, and [Piet] Mondrian. And Cézanne had a special place in his pantheon because he was the supreme painter and favorite of Hoyt Sherman, Roy’s professor and mentor at Ohio State University. 

Narrator: It’s typical of Lichtenstein that he would express reverence through satire. Loran, for his part, tried to sue Lichtenstein. A court found that he had no standing to do so because his publisher was the copyright holder. 

Avis Berman’s biography is titled Becoming Roy Lichtenstein: The Path to Pop.

Alex Da Corte: When I look at Compositions, I think about the secret life of a painter, the secret life of an artist or a poet. 

Narrator: Artist and curator Alex Da Corte.

Alex Da Corte: I see an abstract landscape, but I also see a black-and-white version of a [Jackson] Pollock painting. And Pollock famously said, “When I’m painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing.” And yet here, if I consider Compositions as a bird’s-eye view of a Pollock painting, right in the center is where the artist goes under compositions where it says “name.” This is a very generous painting, as is so many of Lichtenstein’s paintings, where you have the space to project yourself into the painting. It is in some ways a “how-to.” How to make an Abstract Expressionist painting. How to compose a painting at all. How to be an artist.

Narrator: Lichtenstein’s source material for Girl with Ball was an ad for a resort in the Pocono Mountains, in Pennsylvania, that ran in the New York Times.

Avis Berman: This is a real departure because it’s a black-and-white photograph, and he turned it into a very assertively painted comic strip heroine. I mean, the original advertisement does not look comic at all. So he was making things comic-strip-oriented when they weren’t.

Narrator: Lichtenstein’s biographer, Avis Berman.

Avis Berman: Lichtenstein was playing with abstraction here. No hair looks like that. It really is a mini abstraction. And the other really interesting thing going on here is a key tenet of Lichtenstein’s art: he was always exploring the process of perception, which is what you see versus what you think you see. Now the nose here is made up of two dots and a line. Now, a nose doesn’t look like that, but we've all been trained to recognize the signs for the nose, the cliché for the nose. So you think you see a nose, but you really don’t. And the mouth is even more amazing because that is certainly not anatomically accurate. And it’s really a red. In the middle of the page, it’s kind of a red clone of the beach ball to strangely balance the picture. So through this painting, he looks at perception and the mass media communication of beauty.

Narrator: Curator Meg Onli talks about Lichtenstein’s Laughing Cat.

Meg Onli: This is a painting that is a little unlike other of Lichtenstein’s paintings. The rumor is that it came from either kitty litter or that it was coming from cat food. I like to think kitty litter. It feels right to me. This was originally painted in 1961. So this is very early in his Pop career but not early in his painting career. And you have more of a wash in the background. It’s almost like this golden brownish wash as well as this very inky rendition of a cat that is kind of navy-ish black.

I think of it actually as an early cat meme [laughs]. And a fun fact is that it was actually owned by Andy Warhol.

Narrator: When Lichtenstein made this painting, he’d been teaching and making art for about fifteen years, first in Oswego, New York, and then in New Jersey. He’d tried to make his way into the New York art world making paintings in an Abstract Expressionist style. But in 1961, the year he made Laughing Cat, he suddenly landed on his comic-inspired Pop style. Take a look around this room—you’ll see other works he made at this moment. They were all in his first, life-changing exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery. Later on, he’d work in sustained series. But as you’ll see here, this early Pop work is pretty varied in its subject matter.

Meg Onli: At this time, he’s really looking at the visual culture of the late 1950s, early 1960s. And anything from a hero comic of a person blowing up an airplane to a romantic melodramatic kiss to engagement ring can then be met with something that could be cat litter packaging.

Narrator: Lichtenstein’s biographer Avis Berman describes the way that the artist made this untitled abstract painting. 

Avis Berman: He squeezed rows of pigment on a glass palette. And after they were there, he would take a clean white rag and wrap it around his forearm. And then he would put his forearm on the palette and swoop across and pick up the columns of paint. And then he would whoosh that column onto the canvas and he would keep doing that until he filled up the surface.

He constructed these paintings with real deliberation. He makes the surfaces even more lively by scribbling with what looks like a crayon but is paint. I don’t know if he used a brush or not for this, but it looks like he probably put the rag on his fingers and went across with his fingers and did something like finger painting to get the scribbles. The painting is supposed to feel improvisational, but it’s not.

Meg Onli: Masterpiece is sort of his credo, his artist manifesto in certain ways. 

Narrator: Curator Meg Onli.

Meg Onli: It’s a painting that depicts two people originally drawn by Ted Galindo for a Marvel comic in which a woman says, “Why, Brad, darling, this painting is a masterpiece! My, soon you’ll have all of New York clamoring for your work.” So there’s a real sense of humor in tongue-in-cheek that’s already happening with Lichtenstein here. He had been working for years sort of in anonymity in Ohio, in Oswego, in New Jersey. And so for him, he’s positioning himself. And one of the things I think is really strong and maybe undervalued about his practice is that it’s not simply his prowess as an “image duplicator,” and I’m using air quotes here, as replicating this machinelike imagery. It’s also his way of re-contextualizing images. 

I think for someone like Lichtenstein, we can see him as this precursor to our very moment. So if you think about online visual culture, oftentimes images that we’re seeing are not in their original context. They’re not authored, necessarily. Let’s say something like a meme or a GIF. But what really happens with Lichtenstein’s work is he’s not only interested in the recontextualization of images; he’s also interested in what it means to use the imagery that looks mass-produced but to then create, in this incredibly fastidious and tedious way, through his own hand.

Narrator: This painting is a study for the towering mural on the M and O Terrace, which you’ll find around the corner from the introduction to this exhibition. The original was one of ten paintings on architect Philip Johnson’s World’s Fair Pavilion. 

Mitchell Lichtenstein: That was in 1964. 

I do remember very well his painting this mural on the front of our garage in New Jersey when I was a child. And it took up more than the face of the garage.

Narrator: Mitchell Lichtenstein, one of the artist’s two sons.

Mitchell Lichtenstein: And I do wonder what the neighbors in this suburban New Jersey thought of this giant comic strip being painted in view of all the neighboring houses.

Given the kind of 1960s American conventional role of women at that time, you might think of her as a kind of a Rapunzel who is not necessarily seeking a suitor to escape from the prison, but just an escape from this prison of her time. And I do think my father was aware of the conventions at the time. I think that a lot of his work from this period is drawing attention to those conventions, whether it’s about masculinity or femininity or the place of the war paintings, the aggressive macho figures in those versus the very conventional femininity of, say, this woman.

Narrator: Look closely at the surface of this painting, Drowning Girl. You’ll notice that the fields of dots that Lichtenstein has used to fill in the colored areas are very regular. Lichtenstein did lay them down by hand. But compared to works he’s made just a year or two earlier, this one looks crisp and mechanical. He’d developed his approach to the content as well. 

Avis Berman: Lichtenstein had become expert in heightening the atmospheric tension and conveying a sense of an action interrupted, but an action nonetheless, and one involving an extreme situation. 

Narrator: Lichtenstein’s source for the image was Secret Hearts, a romance comic book illustrated by Tony Abruzzo and published by DC Comics in 1962. Avis Berman. 

Avis Berman: You can also see that Lichtenstein heightened the emotional impact if you compare it with the original source cartoon, which was a lot less fraught because the audience could see that a happy ending was imminent. Because help in the form of a male savior is on the way. Lichtenstein crops anything that gives us those kinds of clues to the story, and he isolates the drowning girl herself. You don’t know what’s going on narratively because he’s eliminated anything from the scene that suggests an episode, and he’s edited the dialogue too. He destroys the anecdote. He sweeps away any detail that registers as clutter, and he deprives us of a resolution.

Narrator: In these five paintings, Lichtenstein responded to a series that Impressionist Claude Monet made in 1895. Monet painted Rouen Cathedral in Normandy, France, many times to explore how changing light and atmosphere affect our perception. Lichtenstein chose one of those images and re-created it five times over, using just two colors per canvas. 

Alex Da Corte: The order of the color in this particular suite is meant to be from sunrise to sunset. And so yellow signals the break of day, and oranges, purples, and greens a transition from midmorning to high noon to the afternoon, and rounding out the evening with dark blues and blacks, where what you see and what you don’t see ride a fine line. 

It’s a common misconception that Roy Lichtenstein used Ben-Day dots. Ben-Day dots, which are a very common machine-made printing process invented by Benjamin Day.

Narrator: In that process, dots of different opacities are overlapped or spread apart to create various hues. Lichtenstein used dots like a cartoonist: by taking out or adding dots to solid fields of color. Even so, many people still describe his marks as Ben-Day dots.  

Alex Da Corte: And so what we see here in the cathedral suite is two colors, side by side, and one a field of dots, and one a field without dots. And for the viewer to understand that this is an image of anything at all, one must look both close and far away to see the positive and negative at play.

Narrator: Find the largest black-and-white painting to the right. Lichtenstein called it Mirror #1. He began his series of mirror paintings in 1969, after he saw a brochure from a mirror fabrication company. Curator Meg Onli. 

Meg Onli: He was really intrigued by this idea that these airbrush mirrors signified reflection, but never actually reflected anything. And so he began doing photographs in his own studio, and he tried out making mirror paintings. And sometimes when you’re standing in front of these mirror works, your eyes are really trying to focus and figure out exactly what is happening on the surface. They’re purely abstract. 

In Mirror #1, actually the largest work that he ever makes in this series, is majority just black and white. It’s gradated with his dots; you can see some black outlines that are a little more traditional to Lichtenstein. But you also get this sense of kind of a wave of light coming by. You also never see a reflection. And so for today, I think to myself, I’m often thinking about these works in relationship to the screen and thinking about ideas of alienation, surveillance. It’s a very contemporary reading on these works, but the fact that you’re never being directly reflected by them, but they also have this kind of domineering presence at the same time. And in the gallery that we’re standing in, it’s painted completely silver and you’re surrounded by these. So it feels almost like an aperture or camera focusing on you.

Narrator: Look Mickey is the first painting Lichtenstein made using imagery drawn from cartoons. Artist and curator Alex Da Corte.

Alex Da Corte: What I think is interesting about positioning a painting from 1961 near the end of the show is actually looking back to an animation technique that has been deployed in this painting that has not really been discussed so much in all of the literature around this painting, which is that of anticipation. You don’t see the active action of fishing per se, or the active act of giggling per se, but you see steps before these actions occur. Here, Roy has baked in anticipation to what would then become a new path for his whole making stylistically and conceptually.

Alex Da Corte: So what then is interesting about Look Mickey is that it is made in 1961. It is shared with his peers. It is shared with his gallery dealer, Leo Castelli, but it is never officially shown until much later at the National Gallery [of Art] in a group show in the early eighties.

Narrator: And yet, Lichtenstein did in some ways anticipate the painting’s public display. Turn around, and take a look at the long wall of paintings opposite Look Mickey. One of them on the left comes from 1973, and shows an imaginary version of the artist’s studio, covered in real and imagined works of art. One of the imagined works is a painting of nothing but a text bubble. One of the real ones is Look Mickey. 

Alex Da Corte: From my understanding, Roy recognized that this painting mattered to him and the ways in which painting and where source imagery would come from in time would forever be changed, not only by just him, by other artists as well, but this participation in all kinds of media and that high and low would be flattened and that richness and things that are interesting could be born out of anything. So in the artist studio painting, which embodies so many ways of making and so many modes of looking, it seems righteous then that the artist studio is the site where things from the past or things from the future can coexist. Things that are real and things that are experimental or imaginary are all okay and welcome. This is how one makes anything new.

Alex Da Corte: Super Sunset Billboard here in the galleries is a simplistic, flattened, cartoonlike, pointillist version of what is outside the window. 

Narrator: Artist and curator Alex Da Corte.

Alex Da Corte: The sun floating above the skyline, setting over the Hudson River. Aristotle wrote about the persistence of vision and proposed that if we shut our eyes immediately after looking at the sun, we would be surprised to find that the image remains—the afterimage. We will discover that such an image, when its impression is no longer observable, may grow or change over time, and so too our relationship to it. I propose that our relationship to the sun changes every day, as our wrinkles and freckles evidence this, as our perspiration or lack of perspiration is evidence of this. What is blinding one day is beautiful the next. And Super Sunset Billboard here offers an opportunity to consider the ways in which the sun is changing and how we remember it changes too.

Narrator: Mitchell Lichtenstein has said that he is struck by the economy his father brought to this painting. 

Mitchell Lichtenstein: You see the way he tried to represent the most with the least . . . I don’t want to say . . . effort [laughs], but the least seemingly artistic effort. So by taking a sponge soaked in paint, he could create foliage. He's taken a screen of graduated Ben-Day dots to indicate the mountains. And just by changing the color at the bottom of the screen, we see what is presumably water and maybe some plants where the green is. But it’s all done super economically.

Narrator: Lichtenstein’s series inspired by Chinese landscape paintings turned out to be among his final works.  

Mitchell Lichtenstein: I think of this series as his most pared down, visually, but at the same time, his most expansive. It’s an example of the humor always at play in his work that has taken this ancient genre that evokes nature with such subtle brushstroke work that nature is elevated to a spiritual realm. And here, cheekily attempts the same result using a very opposite technique: the mechanical shading device of the Ben-Day dot. My father did not have a spiritual bent, but I feel that this painting achieves a spiritual presence, perhaps despite him.

Narrator: These tactile designs illustrate the progression of Lichtenstein’s signature dot over the course of his career. From left to right, this evolution is demonstrated by details of four works from this exhibition presented in chronological order. 

Lichtenstein’s dots were not a fixed formula, but a technique he continually refined from the early 1960s until his death in 1997. He made Portrait of Allan Kaprow in 1961 by making the dots by hand, using a fine-tooth comb to paint rows of repeated marks. The painting is a highly stylized depiction of a man against a dark red background. Lichtenstein used dark red dots for shading across Kaprow’s face. The detail of this work zooms in on the figure’s left eye.  

The next detail, second in from the left, is of Happy Tears, from 1964. By the time Lichtenstein made it, his process had become more controlled, relying on commercial templates to evoke the look of mass-media printing while remaining handmade. The painting is a similarly stylized portrait of a red-haired woman smiling with tears in her eyes. The detail of this work focuses on the blue dots that make her right eye and the tear coming out of it.  

The next tactile graphic, second in from the right, is from a set of paintings titled after the Rouen Cathedral. Lichtenstein made the work from 1968 to ‘69, and it shows the front of the cathedral in red and yellow dots. The detail of this work zooms in on the upper center part of the cathedral, made up of dots that blend with and connect to each other. In both this work and the next one, farthest right, he used custom-made dot templates that allowed for greater variation in scale, density, and atmosphere. 

In Treetops Through the Fog, for example, made in 1996, the dots seem to dissolve into mist, showing how a technique associated with graphic clarity also produces subtlety and depth. This painting shows a pared-down and abstracted view of a mountain range with small, multicolored treetops peeking through white fog, in front of a vast mountain range. The detail of this work shows one mountain made of black dots with a teal treetop in the bottom right corner.   

These tactile designs were created by Clovernook Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired. 

If you’d like to give us feedback about these tactile designs, please email accessfeedback@whitney.org.