Roy Lichtenstein

For technical reasons I stencil in the dots first.  I try to predict how it will come out.  Then I start with the lightest colors and work my way down to the black line…  I work in Magna color because it’s soluble in turpentine.  This enables me to get the paint off completely whenever I want so there is no record of the changes I have made.  Then, using paint which is the same color as the canvas, I repaint areas to remove any stain marks from the erasures.  I want my painting to look as if it has been programmed.  I want to hide the record of my hand.

-         Roy Lichtenstein, interviewed by John Coplans, 1967

This new aesthetic, one which denied as much as possible any record of the artist’s hand, opened an extraordinary new chapter in Art History and mirrored similar development in Warhol’s art of the same time.  Using a minimum of colors and decorative art-nouveau forms, Blue and Green Modern Painting is boldly diluted with a machinated aesthetic.  In an interview with Jeanne Siegel in 1967, Lichtenstein spoke of his interest in the art of the 1930s as source material for his Modern images: “The architects and designers of the thirties apparently…believed in the logic of geometry and in simplicity.  Their art is composed of repeated forms, zigzag marks, repeated lines in a row, or decreasing or increasing spaces, and arcs described by a compass.  It seems that the compass, T-square and triangle dictated their art… There’s all this insane kind of logic – insane because it has no particular place in sensually determined art…It’s mostly the conceptual aspects and the simplicity…that interests me.  I think thirties art is optimistic…It’s the complete acceptance of the machine and the making of the designs simple enough to be carried out by machine”. (John Coplans, ed. Roy Lichtenstein, New York, 1972, pp.92, 94-95)

In the early ‘60s, Lichtenstein began to stencil Ben-Day dots to canvas in order to replicate the pixilated effects of comic book graphics and advertised images.  By using artistic methods that mimic machine generated imagery, Lichtenstein achieved his desire to create works that seem programmed and impersonal. The limited palette of green, white and blue heightens the conceptual rigor produced from the pared-down nature of the subject.  As John Coplans said, “he reduces his form and color to the simplest possible elements in order to make an extremely complex statement.  In short, he uses a reductive imagery and a reductive technique for their sign-carrying potential.” (Ibid. p. 23)  The present work, Blue and Green Modern Painting, is a wonderfully sublime example from this highly diversified series, numerically the largest of Lichtenstein’s oeuvre, which successfully encapsulates Lichtenstein’s interest in machinated minimalism.