LONDONâ€"At a preview of “Lichtenstein: A Retrospective,†at the Tate Modern earlier this week, a man pushed a toddler in a stroller as he considered the artwork. Both studied the paintings with apparently equal interest, which you could understand, since the bold patterns, the thick, graphic outlines and bright colors of Roy Lichtenstein’s work often resemble the simple, eye-catching illustrations of a child’s book or comic.
Almost everyone knows what a Lichtenstein looks like, even if they don’t know that it’s a Lichtenstein. The famed pop-art pieces, with their speech bubbles (“Oh Jeff, I love you too… But…†is the exhibition avatar), and their look of cheap advertising or pixelated television screens, are like Andy Warhol’s soup cans; so reproduced and recognizable that you might never know there is an original.
But this exhibition (on view through May 27), which was shown with some sligt differences at the National Gallery of Art in Washington before coming to the Tate, does a brilliant job of grouping the paintings to show unexpected facets of Lichtenstein’s career. The first major retrospective of his work since his death in 1997, it moves from very early work, made before he embarked upon the comic-book style that would mark him as a major exponent of Pop Art, to the final works, “Chinese Landscapes,†that he painted before he died at 73.
As the New York Times critic Holland Cotter wrote in his review of the show in Washington, “his work looks like no one else’s, and some of it still feels fresh and audacious. He encapsulates, at least in his early work, the spirit of an era. He is embedded in the culture now, and unlikely to be dislodged.â€
To a non-Lichtenstein specialist (that would be me), the Chinese piec! es were the last in a long line of surprises. The first was a room of black-and-white pieces, after the bold primary colors of the early comic-inspired pieces â€" among them the work that put the artist on the path to success, the 1961 “Look Mickey,†inspired by his young son’s picture books.
The monochrome room contains, among other things, an enormous replica of a composition book with a black-and-white swirly- patterned cover. There is no frame; the painting reproduces, becomes, the object itself in Alice-in-Wonderland giant size. There is a painting of a radio, with a real strap attached; an effervescent tablet dissolving in water in an eruption of bubbles; a ball of string. Each object is ordinary, yet so precisely, rendered in their exploded form that they become strange and rather beautiful.
Also a surprise was the large room devoted to homages to other artists: pieces that rework, with due Lichtensteinian detail, paintings by Picasso, Monet and Mondrian, among others. There is als a 1974 homage to Matisse, in the form of four huge paintings that cover the walls of a smaller room. Called “Artist’s Studio,†they offer a vision of Lichtenstein’s own workplace, filled with some of the paintings we have just seen, but without any human figures.
Putting these paintings together in a small room gives the viewer the feeling of stepping into that studioâ€"and into art history; immediately after comes the jolting view of a series of painted mirrors that offer no reflection, and no such comforting immersion in the work.
Most touching, and farthest away from the exploding bombs and emoting women of the famous cartoon pieces, are the final “Chinese Landscapes,†which pay tribute to the nature painters of the Song Dynasty (960-1279). They are delicate, finely wrought studies of sea and sky; the dots are there, but as an almost pointillist shimmer of mist and cloud, with tiny cartoon-clear figures perc! hed right! at the edge of the paintings, minute specks on vast landscapes.
The anxieties of contemporary life, the headlong rush toward consumerism, the shadowy specter of war and violence, and the banal superficialities that Lichtenstein’s most famous work gets at is, here, left behind. The pared down, the unemotional, is a fascinating enlargement of the Lichtenstein we know.
