Painting: Kidding Everybody

"Why, Brad darling, this painting is a MASTERPIECE!" exclaims a luscious blonde in one of Roy Lichtenstein's celebrated "comic strip" canvases of 1962. "My, soon you'll have all of New York clamoring for your work." Pure boasting? At the time, yes. Lichtenstein's first pop paintings were derided as belonging to the "King Features school," and a bad joke. Today, it's all the way to the bank. At 43, Lichtenstein is a pop hero: half a dozen museums own his work, his every show is a sellout, and his prices have jumped tenfold, to $12,000 for a large canvas.

A major Lichtenstein retrospective, with 78 paintings, kinetic plaques, banners, drawings, prints and posters, was unveiled at the Pasadena Art Museum in April, opens at the Minneapolis Walker Art Center this week. Then half the works will move on to Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum, to be joined by Lichtensteins owned in Europe. As the exhibit illustrates, high craftsmanship and an uncommon wit are his hallmarks, for the show abounds with humorous and satirical jabs at painters past and present (see color opposite).

Ripe for Ribbing. In his early period, Lichtenstein was a latter-day abstract expressionist. When he turned to subject matter, he happened on comic strips, he explains, "because of their anti-artistic image and because they are such a modern subject." He took over the whole cartoon vocabulary, including printers' Benday dots (originally suggested to him by the exaggerated dots on a bubble-gum wrapper), primary Magna colors, heavy, black-outlined forms. "I like taking a discredited subject and putting it into a new unity," Lichtenstein says (currently he is working with 1930s pseudo-Bauhaus modern), "I was serious about the comic strips, but I also expected I them to look funny, because the whole idea of doing a comic strip is humorous."

Lichtenstein has gone on to kid other styles. Picasso was ripe for ribbing, he felt, because a Picasso "has become a kind of popular object—everyone feels he should have a reproduction of a Picasso in his home." In Woman with I Flowered Hat, Lichtenstein did "an oversimplification of Picasso, a kind of 'plain-pipe-racks' Picasso." Portions of the paintings were stenciled with Lichtenstein's distinctive Benday dots (applied with a toothbrush through a perforated screen) to simulate the effect of commercial printing—and also to remind the viewer that he is looking at the popular notion of a Picasso rather than the genuine article.

Baked Images. Little Big Painting is a gibe at the high seriousness that surrounded the cult of the brush stroke by the abstract expressionists. "The original brush stroke was a romantic outpouring," explains Lichtenstein. "Here I'm making a simulated brush stroke, but I've removed the idea of something full of passion." He believes that painting in an era of mass media should be impersonal. To heighten this effect, he has even had some of his works executed in porcelain enamel baked on steel panels, turned out these works in editions of six to eight.