Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein, who turned comics into art, died on September 29th 1997, aged 73

The first of Roy Lichtenstein’s comic-book paintings were produced to please his children. Or so he said. But he also said on another occasion, “I wouldn’t believe anything I tell you.” He, in common with many artists, would have preferred not to have talked much about his work. The language was all in the painting. But when he became famous there were interviews to give. “So what started you into this comic-book theme, Mr Lichtenstein?” “It was my children.” It might even have been true. At least the story offered a clue to a vast American middle-class audience eager to understand the new pop art so as to discuss it in a seemingly informed and sympathetic way.

Unlike the abstract impressionists who had preceded pop art, it was clear that Mr Lichtenstein could draw. Not for him the abstractionists’ random brush-strokes and drips; he had a meticulous line and a careful use of colour. Before he became a pop artist, he had an oeuvre of representational painting that anyone could appreciate. He was an artist to respect. You could warm to him. He had fought in the war. Then, in 1965, Life magazine asked: “Is he the worst artist in America?” The question was not so much a provocation as confirmation that he had become the most famous artist in America.

His name was made in two tumultuous years: from a show in the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in 1962 to his public epiphany by Life and others. Critics at the Castelli show were both approving and hostile. But everyone agreed that marrying comic images to fine art was sensational. He had started something. A genre was born. Every artist seemed to turn to pop. Andy Warhol tried to rival him with his paintings of tins of soup, but Mr Lichtenstein was the pioneer. He was able to give up his part-time teaching jobs. In the next three decades he never stopped experimenting in various media, including sculpture, and became rich as his work sold for increasing, and eventually astronomical, prices. But it was for his work in the 1960s that he has a place, of whatever size, in the history of art.

For most Americans the news that Roy Lichtenstein had died this week came in a tribute by President Clinton. America has been both proud and defensive about the flowering of its art in the post-war years. New York, it was said, had replaced Paris as the innovative centre of the art world. Plucking up its courage, America sent to Paris and other European cities a number of exhibitions of its best and brightest, taking the precaution of secretly bribing some critics and other influential people to give them a good reception. But for all this care, masterminded, it is said, by the CIA, Paris has mostly given American art the raspberry.

The likes of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko are seen as unworthy successors to Matisse and Braque. And Marcel Duchamp and other Dadaists had elevated the banal objects of everyday life to art back in the 1920s. The French view is not shared elsewhere in Europe. Mr Lichtenstein, particularly, is liked for his sense of fun. Sometimes he has seemed to be mocking the era of art in which he had been so successful. His father, a property dealer, had told him stories of the peculiarities of the marketplace, and no market is more peculiar than art.

Mr Lichtenstein reflected that you could hang a rag on the wall of a gallery and it would be taken seriously as a work of art. He seemed to be lampooning his success with his picture captioned, “Why, Brad darling, this painting is a masterpiece! My,soon you’ll have all of New York clamouring for your work.”

He once said that his own work was too despicable to hang. Who would want to have in their living room a huge comic picture of a fighter pilot saying “Whaam!” (one of Roy Lichtenstein’s most famous pieces)?

His technique was certainly not despicable. His art school training, followed by experience as a draughtsman, was evident in the precision of his work. He started with small pencil sketches which he enlarged on to canvas with a projector and then filled in the colours. He used stencils and other mechanical aids to help with the shapes. Assistants helped with the boring bits. These are the techniques of commercial artists who produce magazine covers and advertisements. In this sense Mr Lichtenstein was the most successful commercial artist who ever lived.

Mere workers at the coal-face, the artists who laboured away on the comic books that Mr Lichtenstein copied, did not think much of his paintings. In enlarging them, some claimed, they became static. Some threatened to sue him. Whatever the justice of their complaints, in fact Mr Lichtenstein did them a sort of favour. Comic books these days are often taken seriously, the subject of theses (or a sign of growing illiteracy). But this is to miss the point of Roy Lichtenstein’s achievement. His was the idea. The art of today, he told an interviewer, is all around us. It is not Impressionist painting. “It’s really McDonald’s.” Of course, you don’t have to believe everything he said.