Roy Lichtenstein

2004-12-21T19:29:00.000+08:00

Roy Lichtenstein is definitely one of pop art's most memorable artists. A lot of people think he's not that great because of his comic strip materilas he produced, and that he did not have much creativity, but you can't deny that he's one dominating force in the world of pop.

http://www.lichtenstein-art.com

Roy Lichtenstein's Own Pop Art

2004-12-20T13:55:00.000+08:00

ROY LICHTENSTEIN has said he owes his style to comics, but not his themes. His statement to this effect – during an interview with Raphael Sorin (1967) tells us something of the intention behind Roy Lichtenstein’s art.

Both the form and content of commercial comic derive from its function of trivializing and generalizing emotions, actions, people, and objects so as to make these conform to popular opinion. The opinions of their authors, however, remain concealed. The fabrication of comics by production teams in which each specialist is responsible for only one stage of the comic’s production and is therefore unlikely to think of the final result only serves to reinforce this state of affairs. The comic’s professional and one – dimensional ingenuity enables it to activate the human senses, to exercise control over action and movement, to create a certain atmosphere, to generate a bodily, animal presence, to suggest things paused at a subliminal level, things thought but not said.

Lichtenstein’s pictures aim to de – individualize and objectivize emotions and gestures. His paintings look as if they have been produced mechanically. They appear to be perfect and quite anonymous, as if made by a graphic designer. He likes to clean away the “record of my hand” – errors, imprecisions, alterations, for instance – or to “erase” them with ground paint : by doing this he is able to “remove any stain mark”. This is the prosaic tone in which he describes his perfectionism in an interview with John Coplans in 1967 (in 1961 he was still leaving his corrections unguised). Lichtenstein develops his artistic strategy in parallel with his artistic technique. He depicts the content of his pictures in the same manner as a comic or commercial artist whose composition begins with both a preconceived notion of average perceptive powers and a special purpose in mind. But his point of departure is quite a different one, so that he changes the functional context of the comic and of the other media he uses. He redeems their superficial effects and coherence from their unequivocal nature. What was hitherto vacuous, suddenly becomes suggestive and meaningful.

http://www.lichtenstein-art.com/

Roy Lichtenstein and Pop Art

Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein's Own Pop Art