How Roy Lichtenstein became weighed down with superficiality

On both sides of the Atlantic there are still heated debates about who invented Pop Art, the Americans or the British, but it seems much more probable that concurrently each initiated their own brand in response to the zeitgeist of post-war consumerism. Certainly, the American Roy Lichtenstein (1923–97), after near-abstract beginnings, started in 1961 to paint large freehand versions of comic-strip frames, complete with speech bubbles, and exhibited them in New York in the first Pop Art shows. He moved on a bit from comic strips to Disney, advertising and the ordinary objects of the modern environment, and developed a style of measured drawing and stencils that broke up colour into what looked like the Ben-Day dots of mechanical reproduction familiar from newspapers.

Thus he formalised his images on a grand scale, rendering the banal horribly monumental. Dots and bold outlines on flat images became his signature, and were endlessly repeated. In effect, he became a prisoner of his manner, weighed down with all that superficiality, and never quite managed to crawl out from under the burden. The various slight changes in style and content in this vast exhibition indicate that from time to time he tried unsuccessfully to free himself, and in the process made some of his most interesting work.

One of the other subjects that Lichtenstein enjoyed painting in his precise deadpan style was great big splashy brushstrokes — the sort of thing you might find on Abstract Expressionist canvases. The Tate’s exhibition, Lichtenstein: A Retrospective, starts here, with a room of three of these dot-bound semi-abstract images, powerful enough in their own way, and no doubt intended (by the curators) to emphasise the fact that Lichtenstein is a great painter. Actually, he’s more effective as an image-maker (the image being more important than the paint — a fine distinction), which emerges as you wander through the rooms, greeting old friends like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, and the famous explosions — whether rendered in oil on canvas or enamel on steel — together with the heart-throb comic-book guys ’n’ dolls.