Monday, July 23, 2012

Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective

A major show of work by the renowned artist of his era, who for long had been a household name for his bewildering Benday dot paintings of the 1960s, takes place at the Art Institute of Chicago. Roy Lichtenstein died in 1997, leaving behind a rich legacy of paintings and other works.

Roy Lichtenstein was immersed in twin influences of art history and popular culture during his life time. Using a matte knife, he was ceaselessly slashing away at several earlier artworks, colorful and small abstractions that dated to the late ’50s.  He had dug many of them out of somewhere and was simply cutting them up,” his wife recalled.

“So his assistant and I almost yelled, ‘Stop!’ ” She recently said in an interview. And the two did manage to grab a few of the works and quietly tuck them away. Now three of the paintings, lent by Ms. Lichtenstein from her treasure trove of her late husband’s works, are surfacing in an exhibition, entitled ‘Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective’.

According to Ms. Lichtenstein, she assumed he (her husband) wasn’t happy at all with many of the early pieces, but that they may well round out the public’s perception of his works. She revealed, “I think it is a good idea to have them there. He wasn’t someone who suddenly emerged fully formed. In fact, he experienced a somewhat tortured phase as an artist before that. He often used to describe putting his works on the roof of his old car, going from gallery to gallery.”

Merely by preserving them in the first place, she helped shape the new show, which includes over 170 works and will travel to the Washington-based National Gallery of Art, the Pompidou Center in Paris, and the Tate Modern in London, eventually.

The Chicago retrospective consists of many of the Pop paintings viewers may already know, such as ‘Drowning Girl’ (1963). But then there is a surprise in store in the form of nearly 50 works on paper, a medium not included in the show almost two decades ago. The focus on drawings was something Ms. Lichtenstein liked, because they show the late artist’s hand more and also testify that he wasn’t merely an artist who would appropriate from comic books. The drawings project him as a master of composition very much in his own right.

No comments:

Post a Comment