Lichtenstein: The Evolution Of Pop

Kelly Stanton

ARH4642

June 3, 2005

Lichtenstein: The Evolution of Pop

Pop art seems to have emerged as a result of consumer culture in America, and also in a response Ð'- partly in accordance, partly in divergence Ð'- to abstract expressionism. Pop art during the sixties created a union of high art and low art Ð'- and now the low was overriding the high. The early sixties saw the techniques of the avant-garde used in commercial design (p 449), and it seems somehow fitting that in turn, commercial design would somehow find its way into the halls of high art. Pop artists Ð'- Lichtenstein in particular - retain some of the values of modernist painting, but in a way that greatly negates it; in pop art the representational images is back and here to stay. Lichtenstein's work, and indeed pop art in general, challenged oppositions that the previous art of the twentieth century had already established; it brought lowly subject matter to the world of high art, as well as certain commerciality, and a rendering of representation that had been previously dismissed from art.

Critics charged pop art with banality on two accounts: through content as well as procedure (p 445). The content of pop artists' work was seen as the low art of iconic images overriding the high art that had been established through modernism. Lichtenstein chose as his content iconic images Ð'- cartoons, comic strip figures, whereas an abstract expressionist artist like Pollock considered his painterly stroke to be autographical; it was representational of the artist himself Ð'- if you could identify with an abstract expressionist painting, you could identify with the artist himself. Pop images from Lichtenstein and Warhol were copies, were pre-made; they were nonrepresentational of the great artist's personality and practices such as silk screening were viewed as a lack of originality in procedure.

During the time that pop art began to materialize in America, it seemed as if all images were "mediated" or "screened"; form had undergone the revolution of mechanical reproduction Ð'- images were printed, broadcast (p 445-7). It seemed as if the world was exploding with new inventions during the fifties, with consumerism quickly becoming an apparent popular culture. Pop art seems to latch onto this consumerism, and perhaps by bringing something as mundane and everyday as a Coke bottle into the world of high art, it can be argued that pop art strove towards a kind of Western World consumer culture universality. It adds to this argument that Warhol himself remarked that he liked Coke because everyone from movies stars to pathetic bums could drink it; Coke didn't discriminate, it gave everyone something in common.

Roy Lichtenstein was proficient in the old ways of modernist painting (gestural stroke, Cubist signs, abstract form of the grid, monochrome) and it would seem that he couldn't help incorporating some of the modernists' methods into his work (p 448). In his early work he looked towards more traditional pop images for inspiration, and he actually took practice in the already established modernist tradition. But he begins incorporating representational forms into his work in such a manner as to be completely