Art of the 20th Century: Roy Lichtenstein

The art of Roy Lichtenstein is immediately obviously and memorable; once you've seen one of Lichtenstein's comic book pastiches you aren't likely to pass by another without recognizing the artist behind it. Although, you may be forgiven for confusing his name with Robert Rauschenberg. Lichtenstein is one of the two icons of what came to be known as Pop Art. The other was the infinitely less talented and therefore infinitely more famous Andy Warhol. Try if you can to forget you ever heard that name Warhol and focus on Roy Lichtenstein if you want to enjoy Pop Art. What Lichtenstein did with his art was to set the stage for the elevation of the mundane and the popular to the level of DaVinci. All those books that treat shows like The Simpsons and Buffy the Vampire Slayer as seriously as Shakespeare or Chaucer owe a debt of gratitude to Roy Lichtenstein. His genius was in the transformation of representation from the obvious to the sublime.

The primary criticism aimed toward Pop Art is located on the foundation that the banality of the subject is enforced by the banality of the representation. In other words, the high artistry of the Renaissance is located not only within the arena of choosing exceptional subjects for painting and sculpture but also in the means in which subjects from the Bible were represented. Clearly, the painting of the Sistine Chapel bears greatest genius than a silkscreen of a Campbell's Soup can. The problem that Pop Art had was that it was competing with the non-representational artistry of the abtract expressionists. The squiggly lines of Jackson Pollack or the violence of Willem de Kooning seemed like a step forward; the highly representational works of Lichtenstein and Warhol on the other hand seemed to be retrogressive.