Sunday October 21, 2012
Lichtenstein retrospective
A retrospective of US pop artist Roy Lichtenstein’s work, including his 1963 canvas, Whaam! at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the United States. The gallery holds more than 364 works by Lichtenstein in its permanent collection. — AFP pic ROY Lichtenstein, the American painter whose comic book-inspired canvases gave the Pop Art movement some of its most vivid images, has been given his first major retrospective since his death 15 years ago.
Beginning Oct 14, the National Gallery of Art in Washington is exhibiting 130 of his paintings, drawings and sculptures, reflecting a long and prolific career that ended when he passed away at the age of 73.
The show moves to the Tate Modern museum in London next February and, in a less expansive form, to the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in July 2013.
Its curator Harry Cooper called Lichtenstein, a New York native, “one of the most popular” modern artists alongside his contemporary Andy Warhol.
“I don’t think he would want to be considered, above all, an American painter. He’s a great modern painter. He had a great visual culture, a great background, training in all the history of art.”
The show begins with an early work, Look Mickey, gifted to the National Gallery of Art by the artist in 1990. It depicts Donald Duck hooking his own tail while fishing on a pier with a guffawing Mickey Mouse.
It was an early example of Lichtenstein’s appropriation of Ben-Day dots – the tiny coloured pixels that made possible the high-volume printing of pulp comic books in the 1950s and 1960s. Lichtenstein’s intention, Cooper said, was to turn the language of comics into a work of art.
Also in the retrospective is Whaam! from 1963, arguably Lichtenstein’s best-known work, showing one fighter plane blowing up another in mid-air with a minimum of painterly detail and a maximum sense of impact.
“He doesn’t denounce, and he doesn’t celebrate, either. We sometimes don’t know what the tone is, what the point of view is. That’s part of the definition of Pop Art ... a kind of removal of the artist,” Cooper said.
Lichtenstein remains highly sought after by collectors. Last November, Christie’s auction house sold his 1961 work, I Can See The Whole Room ... And There’s Nobody In It!, for a record US$43.2mil (RM131mil) in New York. – AFP
Source:
RSS
