Lichtenstein's Lesson

Despite their near complete adoption into American culture, Lichtenstein's paintings--on display in a retrospective of the artist's work at the Art Institute of Chicago--are still striking when seen in person. Their familiar quality seems to speak anew even as the bits of dialogue Lichtenstein included feel like distant memories recollected.

The question they pose is, in fact, the same question critics asked--with various degrees of spite and awe--when Lichtenstein's trademarked style was first displayed in New York galleries: what can a cartoon tell us as a work of art? How can a cartoon be hung next to a Matisse with any degree of seriousness?

Pop Art always attempted to question the very basis of art and the fundamental (if unspoken) assumptions about art's subject matter. But what separated Lichtenstein from Warhol (read as: what elevates Lichtenstein over schtick) is that his work is built on the same material as traditional art--his dot patterns made by hand and brush, not falling on the "theory" of the photocopier and its implications for modernity.

And yet Lichtenstein's work brings to the fore a manufactured quality in art. His brushstroke paintings highlight the immense effort it takes for a master artist to put brush to canvas and destroys the myth of the "natural" artist by systemically and openly re-creating the basic effort behind any painting. His landscapes re-imagine the most obviously natural images by siphoning them into the most basic elements of structure and color. The result is the overlapping of modern sensibilities and timeless scenes as the viewer can't help but feel both simultaneously.

The effect stems, of course, from Lichtenstein's infamous dot style. But the un-masked imperfections--smeared paint, differing levels of pressure on similar dots, etc.--belie a kind of authenticity in human creation. These works are a display of how the modern consciousness breaks down its reality. The point is not that Lichtenstein's mistakes set him apart from Warhol because he actually made dot after dot--rather, it's that the paintings themselves bare the mark of a human imperfection by combining a manufactured perception with the subject matter that shapes modern persons.

Nowhere is this quality more evident than in Lichtenstein's portrayal of George Washington. The painting captures a likeness through a creative process that is highly mechanical, creating a cartoonish portrait of an American legend. The work discloses a subconscious level of idealization in the very historical events tangible in American culture today. To equate, stylistically, the first President with Mickey Mouse is to put on a display a certain structural fact of how we engage with historical persons and events.

Though his developments have become far less revolutionary, Lichtenstein's paintings maintain their prescience by tracing the similarities between the natural and the manufactured.