R
oy Lichtenstein’s paintings of large, comically caricatured brushstrokes in the mid-1960s seemed to parody the seriousness of the loaded-brush gestures of the postwar New York School as exemplified by Willem de Kooning or Franz Kline. But perhaps the more immediate and forceful memory behind them lies instead in his own formation—one toward which he came to feel an ambivalence bordering on hostility.
Lichtenstein’s canvases from the period between 1958 and 1960 eliminated the recognizable subjects of his first, folkloric paintings, the better to accommodate forceful gestures in textile-like patterns. Eye-witness accounts bring to light the mechanical contrivance that Lichtenstein introduced between his physical movements and the trails of paint that stretch across these unprimed canvases. Laying down three or four colors on a sheet of plate glass, he would take a rag and pick all of them up simultaneously, transferring the clenched cluster of pigments with one continuous motion onto the canvas in parallel tracks.
Once he had made his legendary transition to a comic-derived style, however, that sort of play on Abstract Expressionist gesture became unbearable to him. His wife Dorothy told a Times reporter about stopping by his Bowery studio of the mid-1970s. Instead of painting, her husband was slashing away at these colorful abstractions. “He had dug them out of somewhere and was just cutting them up,” she recalled. “So his assistant and I yelled, ‘Stop!’ ” As her intervention rightly demonstrated, these were and remain by no means negligible works. At the time of their making, Lichtenstein had been a mature and accomplished painter for nearly a decade, with a record of exhibitions and positive reviews in New York (he would regularly tie his canvases to the roof of the family station wagon to make the trek to the city from upstate New York or the New Jersey suburbs).
His legendarily sudden move to a Pop, comic-style idiom soon took him out of any such privation, but his purpose had never been to compromise for the sake of commercial success. His vernacular style of figuration was adapted to a more ambitious aim, indeed no less an ambition than re-inventing the traditional capacities of representational art, his particular Pop idiom serving as a means to keep on with representation in the face of an art scene that had little use for it in any other guise. His reserved and largely unruffled personal manner held him apart from any provocative identification with mass-cultural artifacts he depicted; he tended instead to characterize his materials in quasi-archaeological terms, likening them to documents in a dead language. His goal, as he put it, was to channel the stylistic uniformity discovered in the pages of news-stand comic books “towards a new classicism.”
As Lichtenstein thought and re-thought his own approach to representation in art, themes of water and water’s edges came to the fore, their acknowledged master being Claude Monet, who had built his art out of reflective surfaces. Entablature layers bands of organic and classical motifs, at the center of which is a narrower strip of metal foil pressed into a bed of sand, a simple device that deftly captures the play of the sun over the light afternoon chop that turns water silver. Having done a print series with Donald Saff that aimed to fix into place the transient play of glazed reflections over an underlying image, Lichtenstein, in Saff’s words, “wanted to use that process to deal with how Monet used water in a more physical manner, by doing something that would reflect and break up the light into spectral colors. We began to speak about the Water Lilies, and the refracting and reflecting of light on water, but relative to metal and glass surfaces.”
It took them some time to pin down to a concrete source for the metallic effect he had in mind. But trial and error led them to a kind of Pop object, probably the most popular attraction in the museums of Washington DC, namely, Charles Lindbergh’s “Spirit of St. Louis.” The patterns of grinding on its metal fuselage yield a shifting, refracting, scintillating play of light. Experimentation by Lichtenstein and Saff yielded a tighter fish-scale pattern, whereby the hard, glinting scored patterns in reflective metal interact with fragmented color dots to re-invent Monet’s fluid undercurrents, these then overlaid by opaque, appliqué shapes that stand for floating botanical forms (as anticipated with aluminum foil in the study for Water Lily Pond with Reflections.
In this respect, the later work reveals overlooked depths in Lichtenstein’s first phase. While the freshness of the early work remains undiminished, one sees beyond the mere charm of his impertinent subject matter. The façade of a popular genre has obscured complexities consistent with his lifelong re-examination of the ways in which art conjures meaning and experience, as in the way he locked his subjects into a cage or openwork trellis of unrelieved black of almost art-nouveau fluency, leaving the colored dots to swim free of these opaque arabesques. He made that effect strikingly evident in in the underlying recapitulation of his 1960s romance repertoire, Reflections on Girl, from the 1992 “Reflections” print series, in which he subjected the famous types from his first heyday to interruption by diagonal streaks of dot-screen glare.
While actual reflectivity played a part in his early experiments with the commercial, refractive plastic called Rowlux and with the deposit of glossy enamel on steel, the concept of “reflection” held multiple meanings for him beyond the optical properties of light on surfaces. The sculpture of a cheval glass, Mirror I achieves the paradoxical effect of conjuring the effect of vision blocked by a reflecting surface by looking right through it, as most luminous passages turn out to be empty space. In a deeper sense, these ciphers for reflexivity in general meant mental recovery and recapitulation of the past, those “reflections” into the present figuring memory’s imprint on any act of seeing. In 1988, he had applied the same device to the block-letter ART at once the sole motif of the painting and its ironic self-categorization, but now glimpsed through an optical haze that stands for age and time itself.
