Using a magic marker, tape and painted and printed board on paper, Lichtenstein made this "Collage for Still Life with Picasso,” 1973, come alive with brilliant reds and yellows contrasting with the face at the right and strategically placed black Benday dots.
:As a Pop Art trailblazer in the 1960s, Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997) captivated the art world with a fresh, new and exciting visual language. His iconoclastic style melded imagery from popular American culture with hard-edged commercial techniques from advertising and comic strips. His precisely applied bold primary colors, slanting stripes, Benday dots and thick black outlines made his work stand out.
In the words of art historian Avis Berman, Lichtenstein was "an artist dedicated to reexamining problems of form, composition, interpretation and technique." Now an icon of Pop Art, his work seems destined for enduring popularity.
In choosing his subjects, Lichtenstein cast a wide net. He depicted landscapes and interiors, nudes and still lifes with equal facility. With wit and skill, he appropriated ideas from such Twentieth Century artistic titans as Picasso, Millet, Matisse and Monet, and popular entertainment characters like Dagwood Bumstead, Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse. Referring to his wide-ranging use of commonplace imagery, Lichtenstein explained, "The art of today is all around us."
The means by which the artist arrived at his iconic images is explored in a fascinating exhibition, "Lichtenstein in Process," which opened at the Katonah (N.Y.) Museum of Art and is on view at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis through January 17. Originally organized by the Fundacion Juan March in collaboration with the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, the show comprises 65 preliminary sketches, drawings and collages, 1970s–1990s, which offer rare glimpses into the artist's creative process.
The artist achieved this come-hither look and the softness of the tempting beauty in this drawing for "Seductive Girl,” 1996, through astute use of minimal, undulating graphite lines. It measures 10 by 13½ inches.
Guest curator Jack Cowart, executive director of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, points out that Lichtenstein's "personal sourcebooks, clippings, sketchbooks and many, many extant drawings and collages offer some of the best clues to his thoughts and process, plus his hand, touch and eye. In these works, he is planning and scheming, musing on composition and source." He adds that these materials allow observers "to see the selective, editorial artist at work, effecting his trademark transformation of a known or given form or even a form he has thought up freehand into something uniquely his own, while pushing at the boundaries or capabilities of art media."
A New York City native, Lichtenstein attended Ohio State University, where his schooling in figure-ground relationships influenced his later work. Back in New York, he worked first in the prevailing Abstract Expressionist style.
In the late 1950s, Lichtenstein began to execute Expressionist versions of such mundane subjects as machine parts, dollar bills, cowboys and Indians, Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse. "I had the idea of painting banal subject matter of some kind or other, very standard, cliché work," Lichtenstein said.
