We tend to think of Roy Lichtenstein in
one context: Pop art's master parodist. His transformed cartoon panels—with
hyperventilating speech balloons and transcribed sounds like whaam! and
varoom!—sent up mid-20th-century commercial visual culture even as they dragged
it into the realm of fine art.
Roy Lichtenstein's Laocoön (1988), inspired by classical
mythology, will be on view in Chicago.
No museum's contemporary-art collection
is complete without one of Lichtenstein's sighing blondes or square-jawed
fighter pilots. But that's usually all visitors see.
The Art Institute of Chicago intends to
challenge this pigeonholing with an expansive new look at Lichtenstein's vast
and varied output over half a century. The major new show—billed as the largest
survey of the artist's work ever mounted, and the first since his death in
1997—opens to the public on Wednesday.
Culled from public and private
collections in America, Europe and elsewhere, "Roy Lichtenstein: A
Retrospective" brings together more than 160 of the artist's paintings,
sculptures and drawings—several never shown before. After its Windy City stop,
the show opens Oct. 14 at Washington's National Gallery of Art, next Feb. 21 at
London's Tate Modern and July 3, 2013, at Paris's Centre Pompidou. The
underlying message: Roy, we hardly knew you.
This look "at the full
breadth" of Lichtenstein's work, as Art Institute president and director
Douglas Druick puts it, dovetails with continuing demand for Lichtenstein's
work at major art auctions. His "Sleeping Girl," a comic-strip
painting, sold Thursday at Sotheby's in New York for $44.9 million, a record
for the artist.
Such classic Pop works of Lichtenstein,
born in 1923, are well represented in the new exhibition. They include 1961's
"Look Mickey" (which appropriates Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse), some
black-and-white renderings of phone-book ads for washing machines and sneakers,
and the famous recomposed cartoons. But so are Lichtenstein's pre-Pop
experiments in Cubo-Futurism and the dominant (and ultimately rejected) style
of Lichtenstein's youth, abstract expressionism.
In later years, as an entire
80-foot-long gallery in the retrospective demonstrates, the artist spent much
of his time in witty dialogue with art history. He produced paintings that
borrow from and comment on works from antiquity, traditional Japanese
landscapes and American-history painting (such as Emanuel Leutze's
"Washington Crossing the Delaware" of 1851). Lichtenstein's
"dialogues" were also with such artists as Pablo Picasso, Henri
Matisse, Piet Mondrian and 1980s neo-expressionists like Julian Schnabel.
“The signature comic-book heroines disappeared, but
Lichtenstein kept offering fresh takes on art.”
At the same time, the show suggests
that much of Lichtenstein's mature work flowed out of the impulse that animated
his Pop masterpieces of the 1960s: a desire to critique the present moment in
art by offering fresh perspectives on the forgotten, devalued and/or
mass-produced art of the past.
"After 1966, when Lichtenstein's
heroines and pilots from the comics disappear, people think the Pop phase is
over, but that's not true," says the show's co-curator, the Art
Institute's James Rondeau. "As his work moves from the cartoon panels to
explosions, for example, it's the same kind of parodying of extreme emotional
states—the histrionics of war, the melodrama of heartbreak—that the comics are
engaged with in a very detached way."