Roy Lichtenstein’s Witty Critiques of Masculinity
“Roy Lichtenstein: Like New” (at the Whitney through May 10th) is a masterpiece of curation and design, an exhibition that positions Lichtenstein as the last happy white man in American art. Organized with esprit and imagination by the artist Alex Da Corte and the curator Meg Onli, it’s the first retrospective of Lichtenstein’s work in New York since his splash at the Guggenheim in 1993. The show takes up the museum’s entire fifth floor and ends as it begins: with the artist’s signature brightly colored brushstrokes, lines, and Benday dots causing pleasurable kinetic movements in the mind. Lichtenstein’s dynamic style is ubiquitous by now—as are his professional sheen and finish—but that doesn’t cancel out his winning charm, which, like most charm, can warm you up or wear you out. At “Like New,” you may experience both feelings. It’s a show that aims to keep the real world, our gothic political climate included, at bay, while also distracting us from what one might call the grief porn of contemporary art and its constant reminders of our failures as humans.
For years now, the Whitney has foregrounded race- and gender-based political art, and it’s a little trippy to walk around this show’s pearl-gray-painted rooms, looking at Lichtenstein’s Fantastik-clean white world of orderly studios, shiny blondes, and square-jawed men, in a place where white male power has been repeatedly denounced and the sins of past neglect redressed. No one can make up for the past—certainly not by demanding that it be corrected in the present—and it was perhaps inevitable that the Whitney would have to turn, or return, to white men with name recognition to get people back into its galleries post-COVID. Exhibitions devoted to Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol helped, and still fit the Whitney framework: both artists were queer. And although Lichtenstein wasn’t gay, there’s enough irony about gender in his early work to qualify him as being interestingly gay-adjacent.
Still, it’s difficult to entirely undo the way we’ve been viewing art for a while now, and, after having a great time at “Like New,” you may find yourself feeling slightly guilty about it. But one of the more poignant subtexts of the show is that it’s a reminder of the New York avant-garde in the sixties, and of what a beautiful, forceful energy there was to its various voices, with Lichtenstein the least dirty and anarchic of them all. There’s a sweetness in that, and a sadness, too.
I first spent time with Lichtenstein’s work in the early eighties, when I took a class at Columbia on the art of the nineteen-sixties. The professor led us from the glory days of Abstract Expressionism in the fifties, through the emergence of Robert Rauschenberg and Johns by the end of that decade, to this new era in American art. Inspired by Marcel Duchamp and his poetry of the everyday, Rauschenberg and Johns used commonplace objects—a flashlight, a bedspread—in their creations. But artists working under the Pop-art banner in the sixties, including Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Tom Wesselmann, Marisol, and Warhol, picked at the surface of the world that had made them, in order to show us how much it could reveal about what lay beneath it. You can still feel, in the memorable work produced during that period, the critical embrace of all those dance-lesson diagrams, Campbell’s soup cans, ice-cream cones, and Coca-Cola bottles, alongside images of electric chairs, car crashes, and atomic-bomb detonations.
In the Cold War universe, where everyone was isolated and class was defined by the power to acquire (and to oppress), Pop artists painted or sculpted what they saw and heard. The artist’s “aura” had no place in those works; instead, Pop art was a kind of supersonic whistle heralding the disasters to come, that had already come. But unlike, for instance, Rosenquist, in such charged political pieces as “F-111” (1964-65), which juxtaposes consumer objects with missiles, Lichtenstein made work that was less about conscience than about control, and the eradication of mess, of feeling.
Lichtenstein became Lichtenstein in 1961, when he made “Look Mickey.” He had flirted with cartoon characters before then, but “Look Mickey” took things further. Four feet by nearly six, the painting features the brightest of reds, blues, and yellows. In it, Mickey Mouse and the bombastic Donald Duck are standing on a dock, fishing. Mickey covers his laughing mouth because Donald thinks he’s hooked a fish, but the hook is caught on his own coat. The delight of the painting is the pleasure that Lichtenstein took in the joke—and in this new way of making work that was both free and not free of the artist’s hand. (In the age of Pop, achieving an automated look was part of the process.)
Decades before Richard Prince made his fantastic and forlorn cartoon paintings, Lichtenstein was already exploring the idea of entertainment and raising questions: If cartoons were a form of entertainment, was painting a cartoon a form of entertainment, too? Was modern art a put-on? Or something that could be put on? One question that the Whitney show didn’t answer for me was how Lichtenstein got to cartoons, and then to his comic-strip paintings, with their speech balloons, women in distress, and silent men—whose reserve makes us wonder if their creator was a silent man, too.
Born in 1923, into an upper-middle-class German Jewish family in New York, Lichtenstein grew up on the Upper West Side, with easy access to museums and other cultural institutions. He loved music and art, and in 1940 he enrolled at Ohio State University, where he studied life drawing, painting, and the work of the masters, including Picasso. If he insisted on pursuing art, his parents felt, it would be good for him to get a degree, in case he had to teach to get by.
The Whitney retrospective includes “Drawing by Seeing,” a short film about Lichtenstein’s artistic education, made by Da Corte, whose own work includes video, performance, and installations, driven by the kind of avant-gardism that Lichtenstein espoused for a time. The film is shot in color, but with the performers and their costumes colored a “Twilight Zone” gray. It features a voice-over drawn from a text by Hoyt L. Sherman, Lichtenstein’s teacher and mentor at Ohio State. Sherman’s work centered on perception; he’d flash an image on a screen and then have his students draw what they had seen. Or hadn’t. Da Corte’s film also animates some of Lichtenstein’s early works, including “Step-on Can with Leg” (1961), a two-panel painting that shows a woman’s high-heeled foot stepping on the pedal of a closed garbage can, and then the same image with the lid open. Like Warhol, in “Before and After,” a study of a nose job, also from 1961, Lichtenstein was interested in how time can be represented in a static medium, thus changing how we see a thing, or making us realize that we weren’t really looking.
Lichtenstein’s studies were interrupted when he was drafted, in 1943, but he returned in 1946 to finish his degree on the G.I. Bill. By 1949, he was married to the artist Isabel Wilson Sarisky, with whom he had two sons. (Divorced in 1965, he married Dorothy Herzka, a philanthropist, in 1968.) Lichtenstein, shy and reclusive, was a responsible fellow; he supported his family by teaching, while making art that was at first representational, then a little abstract, not terribly distinguished. The breakthrough came in 1960, when he was teaching at Douglass College (which later became part of Rutgers), where he met the performance artist Allan Kaprow, who introduced him to Claes Oldenburg and George Segal, artists who were as taken with the look and signs of masculinity as Lichtenstein was. (Oldenburg’s 1959 work “ ‘Empire’ (‘Papa’) Ray Gun,” for instance, plays on the phallic shape of a firearm.) Surely the freedom that Lichtenstein saw in those sculptors’ work and at Kaprow’s “happenings” helped to release him and open him up to his strongest qualities as an artist: his interest in gender and his amused wit.
Lichtenstein’s wonderful early work “Masterpiece” (1962) still makes me laugh. In it, a couple are looking at a canvas. The woman, a blonde, has a speech balloon issuing from her red lips: “Why, Brad darling, this painting is a masterpiece! My, soon you’ll have all of New York clamoring for your work!” The man is silent, only partially visible, in profile; the woman is our focus. She may be the kind of woman who needs her man to be a success, in order to validate her power as a woman, one who, unlike Donald Duck, has caught a big one. It’s a joke on the bright and shiny, profit-driven art world, where nothing resonates like success. Among other great early works, there’s the funny, ’tude-filled “Ohhh . . . Alright . . .” (1964)—a closeup of a red-haired woman on the phone, looking slightly annoyed as she speaks the title—and “Drowning Girl” (1963), in which a blue-haired woman with tears falling from her closed eyes drowns as much in misbegotten love as in a swirl of black-and-white waves. A thought bubble reads, “I don’t care! I’d rather sink—than call Brad for help!”
These are not really paintings about distress or isolation. They’re about fake feelings in a manufactured world. What was real in Pop? What wasn’t? I liked these works so much when I was younger, and still do, because, for me, Lichtenstein was at his strongest when he wasn’t just a straight man but, rather, a Warhol-adjacent straight man who could critique both masculinity and the self-consciously feminine. The truth is that when Lichtenstein stopped painting “gay,” I stopped looking. From the seventies on, in work that seemed influenced by Léger, Matisse, Picasso, and others, he appeared to be more at play with the straight boys than questioning their performative creativity. (The Whitney curators have put some of the gay back into his work by treating it as a kind of exquisite California-modern decoration; all that’s missing are gray throw pillows.) Still, at the end of the show, I stood by Da Corte’s replica of Lichtenstein’s enormous 1967 work “Super Sunset Billboard,” which shows a horizon and, above it, white streams of light shooting up and out, like klieg lights announcing a show. The painting is the show. Da Corte and Onli have placed the piece in front of a wall of windows overlooking the Hudson; it’s a calming, lovely thing to see a “real” sky echoing Lichtenstein’s. It’s also a thrilling and moving coda to his work—so much so that I got goosebumps. It was the first time I’d ever thought of goosebumps as Benday dots. ♦