Roy Lichtenstein's Retrospective @ The Art Institute of Chicago

Part I: The Windy City celebrates its 175th birthday with Roy, a Master of Pop Art

Aug. 06, 2012

3:07 p.m.

While honoring Chicago's 175th birthday (March 4th) year, the city and its renowned Art Institute of Chicago celebrate with “Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective” this summer. The exhibition displays over 170 artworks, including sculpture, created from the years 1950 through 1997 to represent the first historical retrospective since Lichtenstein's death (1923-1997) that explores a masterful artist clearly ahead of his time.<o:p /> Lichtenstein revered the artist's hand and human touch to the creative process, the balance and beauty seen through the eyes of popular culture, print media and primary colors. After the artist first toyed with abstract expressionism, his prodigious and uncanny abilities came to the forefront with initial forays into Pop Art that began with Look Mickey (1961). In this image, Lichtenstein appeared to meticulously reproduce an iconic animal cartoon figure, yet used original coloring, composition and hand painted dots to reflect the actual printing technique of the era. The 1960's a period when media, then in its infancy, began its acceleration into the forms so familiar in 2012. <o:p /> When early Pop Art entered the art scene during the 60's, Lichtenstein appropriated images from common objects that he drew similar to their portrayal in print media portrayed in his two oil on magna canvases, Large Jewels (1963) and The Ring (1962). As the exhibit explained, Lichtenstein desired “minimal line to express maximum information.”<o:p /> Perhaps the artist will be best remembered to the general public for his “War and Romance” series. Bright and bold images that appear lifted from comic book pages. However, each hand painted dot was carefully executed, planned and plotted by Lichtenstein, where the aesthetic quality was used as he said for, “a sophisticated pictorial language to achieve a unified and harmonious composition.”<o:p /> The “War and Romance” series exaggerated the hyper drama and realism promoted by the media then and their perhaps exploitation of these human and sometimes tragic scenarios seen on the television screen. Expressing a continual hyper state of realism currently ubiquitous on line, where culture will be bombarded with the profession of “celebrity” by everyone from the heiress Paris Hilton to Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson; what they wear to what they eat and how their private lives intermingle with their public presence. Media, if not a majority of culture, absorbs every minute of this so called romance, and the direct counterpoint violence, in magazines, on the internet, or tuned to reality television shows. <o:p /> If Lichtenstein had only envisioned the 21st century, or perhaps his paintings prophesied the future, when he saw how transforming tiny dots to fine art images could resonate with popular culture proliferating in the various media venues. How enamored the public would be with these comic lives that are certainly real, although plastered across a screen as Lichtenstein parodied on canvas. While love and war endure as viable subject material, gleaned from the centuries of art history, Lichtenstein reproduced society's fixation on these human happenings, capitalizing on their familiarity and inherent drama, and manipulated to excess in contemporary media.<o:p /> Two monumental images from this series include We Rose Up Slowly (1964) and Masterpiece (1962), the latter which applies Lichtenstiein's aptly ironic text” “Why Brad, Darling, this painting is a masterpiece. Why soon you'll have all of New York clamoring for your work.” The second installment of the Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective will be featured this week on Art Talk Milwaukee. For further information visit on programs and special events planned for this monumental exhibition visit: roy.artic,edu, <a href=\"http://www.aetis.edu\">www.aetis.edu,</a>  or <a href=\"http://www.artinstituteshop.org\">www.artinstituteshop.org.</a>

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