Intern Amanda Wills has been spending her free time in New York haunting art galleries. Here’s her report on an exhibition of the pop art great Roy Lichtenstein:
Roy Lichtenstein once referred to the women he painted as idyllic beings conceptually made up of black lines and red dots. “I see it that abstractly, that it’s very hard to fall for one of these creatures, to me, because they’re not really reality to me,” the master painter said. “However, that doesn’t mean that I don’t have a clichéd ideal, a fantasy ideal, of a woman that I would be interested in. But I think I have in mind what they should look like for other people.”
The Gagosian Gallery of New York just wrapped its showcase of Lichtenstein’s creations of these ideal women in the exhibit “Roy Lichtenstein: Girls.” In depicting the ideal woman, Lichtenstein may have had the same thought process as Playboy. As his widow Dorothy said in the exhibit catalog, Lichtenstein often expressed his own feelings through the non-threatening cartoons he illustrated, while still having compassion for the female psyche.
“He did have a lot of empathy, because he had many friends who were troubled, and it was easy for him to understand their feelings,” Dorothy said. “He may even have picked these women because he was so reserved in his own being that this was a way of latching on to the emotional highs and lows of life.”She also said Lichtenstein viewed comic books as soap operas depicted in a humorous style. Lichtenstein believed when an image was removed from the story frame, it took on a new meaning. It became a malleable context in which he could interpret and manipulate.
Using mostly primary colors and accents of thick black strokes, Lichtenstein’s “Girls” showed a range of various beautiful women in conditions of distress, sexual battles, personal catastrophes and melodramatic love scenes. Lichtenstein created his animated subjects with thousands of intricate, often asymmetrical, benday dots to construct Caucasian skin tones or mysterious blue eyes.
Lichtenstein believed these dots created mechanical half-tones that better represented certain shades that were harder to create. The artist used the same technique with bow-tie shapes to fashion the apricot-colored lips in “Ohh…Alright...” He also mixed semitransparent blue and red benday dots to create the brassy brunette pictured in “Seductive Girl.”
Starting with the frustrated blonde anxiously looking at the clock on her nightstand in “Blonde Waiting” to the sorrowful farewell lip lock of “Kiss V,” these paintings portray the stereotypical hormonal female, filled with passion, anxiety, and most importantly, sexual desire. Each one of Lichtenstein’s creations mirrors a pivotal moment or the climax of the story he tells with his carefully selected characters.
It’s unlikely that Lichtenstein ever painted women he knew personally. These paintings are not portraits but rather interpretations. He transformed his subjects to make them his own.
“Lichtenstein painted in that very pop quality that when he chose an image, he then changed it by extending the scale and turning it around,” Stefan Ratibor, Gagosian's London-based director, said. “Once this happened, the painting was then an abstract painting. It was then non-representational, only about colors and forms.”
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