
“I want my painting to look as if it has been programmed. I want to hide the record of my hand.”
In the early 1960s, as Roy Lichtenstein developed his now-ubiquitous Pop art approach to the imagery of postwar consumer- and mass culture, he dedicated his attention almost entirely on the common object. Beginning in 1961, and continuing in its greatest concentration through 1963, Lichtenstein narrowed the scope of each of his works to the study of a single motif, rendered in its most essentialized, graphic form. In Atomic Landscape, executed just a few years later in 1966, Lichtenstein makes the incisive yet almost mindless substitution of the household good for the eponymous atomic bomb. In this sly elision of subject matter, Lichtenstein signals the commodification of the atomic bomb itself: the transformation of this symbol of cataclysmic disaster into an object manufactured and proliferated by the mass media. In so doing, Lichtenstein engages the viewer in a tantalizing game of association through which he expounds upon the crux of his career-long artistic thesis: the inextricable relationship between the image and its mode of representation.
As is the case with Atomic Landscape, Lichtenstein’s broader single-subject series conveys consumer society in the form of paradigms. Isolated against solid or half-tone backgrounds, these generic descriptions of household goods are transformed into depersonalized object-types which call upon their reference image as effectively as they dematerialize it. Despite their intimate scale, the austerity of the composition monumentalizes the banality of the commonplace, elevating the commodity to the centrality and grandeur of a portrait. In reducing the image down to its graphic elements, Lichtenstein draws attention to the way in which mass consumption has made the American public fluent in reading signs and symbols as stand-ins for the object being advertised. At the same time, however, Lichtenstein also deconstructs the marketing tactics inherent to this mode of representation. When taken in sequence with this earlier series, Lichtenstein engenders a certain naivete into the mode of presentation within Atomic Landscape which absolves the viewer of their unflinching consumption of the image he presents before them. It is the seeming ease with which he transfers the hard, unsentimental visual language used to describe a peanut butter cup or a ball of twine onto the intrinsically violent motif of the bomb which makes Atomic Landscape so striking.

“I was very excited about and interested in the highly emotional content yet detached, impersonal handling of love, hate, war etc., in these cartoon images… It is an intensification, a stylistic intensification of the excitement which the subject matter has for me; but the style is, as you say, cool. One of the things a cartoon does is to express violent emotion and passion in a completely mechanical and removed style."
This juxtaposition, which imbues Atomic Landscape with its dynamism, is precisely the same tactic which Lichtenstein explains is at the center of his broader artistic project in these early years: an interest “in using highly charged material… (highly emotional subjects) in a very removed, technical, almost engineering drawing style.” (Exh. Cat., London, Levy Gorvy, Source and Stimulus: Polke, Lichtenstein, Laing, March - April 2018, p. 12) A remarkable testament to his incisive eye for draughtsmanship and his dexterity in the language of commercialized printing, Lichtenstein is able to conjure the unmistakable image of the mushroom cloud through the simple arrangement of negative space within a black outline. In its static simplicity, he likewise captures something of the deafening impact of the bomb itself—an effect akin to the shockwave which paralyzes and silences in the aftermath of the nuclear explosion. Though perhaps inadvertently, Lichtenstein’s ubiquitous Ben-Day dots take on a similarly heightened resonance in the context of the present work. As much as they serve to emulate the mechanical, unsympathetic language of the mass-produced image, the dot likewise serves as an evocation of the atomic particle. The dizzying regularity of their application throughout the sky and the drastic change in the density of their application to the water offers a particularly apt visualization of the behavior of the chemical and energetic explosion that he takes as his subject.
Roy Lichtenstein's 1960s Landscapes in Select Museum Collections







Laced throughout Atomic Landscape is an implicit political critique, not, as the artist explains, on foreign or domestic policy so much as it is on the normalization and valorization of violence as expounded by the mass media. The lack of emotional resonance within the work directly correlates to the lack of excess within the composition—a result achieved through Lichtenstein’s use of a generalized reference rather than specific source material. In this generalization, Lichtenstein not only outsources his imagery but his agency over the image as well. In so doing, he creates a critical distance between his subjectivity as an artist and the objectivity of the final work. In his contemporaneous series of Men at War, Lichtenstein similarly appropriates and reproduces mass produced imagery, this time of panels from comics depicting young men in battle. These vignettes at first seem to revel in boyhood fantasies of fearless heroes, exaggerating the intensity and danger of their bravery through the graphic concentration of their action. And yet, when taken out of context of the broader narrative of the long-form comic, these freeze-frames also come to express the violence that constitutes the most destructive aspects of hyperbolic masculinity which these comics, and by extension popular media, stand to promote. Atomic Landscape marks a distillation of this thematic interest down to a representative motif, the explosion, which for Lichtenstein came to increasingly serve as a subject in its own right.
This fascination with our changing relationship to images as brought about by the proliferation of consumerism and a corresponding supersaturated image economy served as the lynchpin for the Pop art movement more broadly. As exemplified in Atomic Landscape, Lichtenstein quickly became adept at creating art which functioned like media: repetitive, impersonal, cool and reserved, yet altogether eye-catching. Here, the commercially derived flatness of his composition signals the reproduced nature of the image-type. As such, the work bears a conceptual kinship with his Pop contemporary Andy Warhol’s famed Death and Disaster series. In Atomic Landscape, as in Atomic Bomb, both artists flatten the sensational, emotional content of the horrific images which they take as subject, reproducing the charged image in the same unflinching mode of address that a newspaper or comic book does. In replicating this effect of popular imagery, both Lichtenstein and Warhol force their viewer to differentiate between the violence of the news and, for example, the glamor of celebrity—all types of consumerism, all presented in the same visual language. And yet unlike Warhol, who adopted the mechanical technique of silkscreening and schematized the idea of reproduction through the gradually distorted repetition of a real image, Lichtenstein works with ersatz stereotypes which admit to being reproductions. Where Warhol numbs his viewer by over-exposing them to an image within the same canvas, Lichtenstein presents them with an image that has already been over-exposed.
From Barnett Newman’s reactionary turn away from representational imagery in the face of the overwhelming devastation of the mid-21st century, to Salvador Dalí’s thematized explorations of nuclear fusion and fission, the cultural, scientific and geopolitical impact of the atomic bomb provided the impetus for a myriad of artistic explorations into the subject by Lichtenstein’s contemporaries. Atomic Landscape is a pendant to a slightly larger canvas of the same composition, entitled Atomic Burst, which Lichtenstein produced as his contribution to the 1966 project, Artists’ Tower of Protest. Spearheaded by artists Irving Petlin and Mark di Suvero, the collaborative installation was staged in West Hollywood, Los Angeles, as a protest against US involvement in the Vietnam war. The tower and fence which surrounded it were covered in over four hundred 24-by-24 inch panels, a show of overwhelming support in response to the open call for artists to submit works in support of the cause. However, in its matter-of-fact simplicity, Lichtenstein’s illustration of the atomic bomb is seemingly devoid of any political or subjective commentary. Despite the charged symbolism, the central aim of his work was to call upon, and in turn call out the way in which the proliferating culture of mass-production has desensitized the American public to the emotional resonance of images. In this context, Atomic Landscape comes to stand as a warning, not against the bomb itself, but against a visual culture which has made a stereotype of it.