Roy Lichtenstein at the Whitney Museum, Review: A Stylish Pop Art Show

If you, like me, cannot resist hate-reading a horribly misguided takedown of a great artist, check out the September 1963 issue of Artforum, which featured one of two screeds against Roy Lichtenstein by artist Erle Loran published that very month. (The other appeared in this magazine.) Loran was ticked off by Lichtenstein’s Portrait of Madame Cézanne (1963), a painting that borrowed Loran’s own diagram analyzing the Paul Cézanne work of the same name. As with the Loran diagram, Lichtenstein’s painting turns Madame Cézanne into a black outline, with letters and arrows diagramming her husband’s compositional choices.

In his Artforum article, sardonically titled “Cézanne and Lichtenstein: Problems of ‘Transformation,’” Loran stole back the Lichtenstein painting, setting an image of it alongside the original diagram, as if to convey the sense that the two are exactly the same. (In fact, they were not: Lichtenstein thinned out Loran’s outline and changed the shape of the arrows.) “A copy of anything, even when blown up to the monumental size of a billboard, is still a copy,” Loran complained. “Copies are not transformations.”

The irony of Loran’s essay is that he was right: Lichtenstein’s painting really was a copy, albeit not a perfect one. But what Loran did not understand was the intention behind Lichtenstein’s painting, whose purpose was not to transform Loran’s diagram but to translate it to a new venue and consider whether its meaning changed along the way. Brought from the page to the gallery wall, Loran’s diagram looks a bit like anti-art rather than reverent analysis of a masterpiece. Copies are not transformations, except when they are.

Lichtenstein would go on to copy a lot more imagery produced by others: famous paintings by Henri Matisse, comic books depicting emotionally tormented women, advertisements for appliances and medications. But what does it mean if Lichtenstein’s work has itself been copied endlessly, with his benday-like dots covering everything from cheap posters to throw pillows to haute couture?

A long-awaited Lichtenstein retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York contends that his art’s ubiquity actually means it was a success. He saw our pictures-obsessed moment coming, the show implies, and even deliberately fed into it.

The Whitney show (through May 10) is titled “Like New,” which is something of a misnomer, given that it doesn’t radically upend one’s understanding of Lichtenstein. Doing so has simply become too difficult—this is the third Lichtenstein retrospective staged in the US in the past 35 years, after all. But the Whitney show does, at least, return some sangfroid to the Pop artist’s work. It suggests that, while he may have gleefully foraged from art history and painted with cheery reds and yellows, as past retrospectives proposed, he was really interested in mean-spirited aesthetic thievery more so than anything else.

This stylish show, organized by Whitney curator Meg Onli and artist Alex Da Corte, makes that much apparent with its opening. Walk the length of a gargantuan remake of a 1983 mural cannibalizing many of Lichtenstein’s signature motifs (brushstrokes, benday dots, and the like), and you end up at Image Duplicator (1963), a painting of two bulging eyes with raised brows. The image looks like it could be from the funny pages, and is fittingly given text in a comic font situated in a speech bubble: “What? Why did you ask that? What do you know about my image duplicator?” (Neither the picture nor the text, though respectively based on panels in X-Men and My Greatest Adventure, is faithfully appropriated, by the way.) Think of Lichtenstein as the curators’ own image duplicator, and recall that painting when you look at all the doubles and triples they’ve presented.

They offer, for example, Lichtenstein’s 1961 portraits of dealer Ivan Karp and artist Allan Kaprow. The two look virtually identical here, both donning white tuxedos and set against crimson backgrounds, even though they did not look alike in actuality. Later comes Modern Painting Triptych (1967), in which Lichtenstein offers three repeated views of an Art Deco ligature filled in with blue dots.

The duplication even goes meta at various points in the show. Alongside Lichtenstein’s originals, Da Corte and Onli feature appropriations of Lichtenstein in the form of paintings by Richard Pettibone and Sturtevant and a photograph by Louise Lawler, the last of whom is a leading figure of the appropriation-minded Pictures Generation of the 1980s. The curators have also organized an exhibition within an exhibition, producing a simulacrum of Lichtenstein’s 1962 Leo Castelli Gallery debut. Housed in a walk-in room situated within a larger exhibition hall, the Castelli copy is so faithful that even the gallery’s parquet floor has been reconstructed here.

Da Corte and Onli do not state that Lichtenstein was the only master appropriator of the Pop movement—no one can forget Andy Warhol’s contributions, which the Whitney memorably surveyed in 2018. Nor do they proclaim that Lichtenstein necessarily did anything entirely different from his peers. But they persuasively show that the iciness of Lichtenstein’s art—its “conceptual detachment,” per Onli’s catalog essay—inflects it with an unusual flavor that has often been forgotten as a result of its beautiful surfaces.

The curators smartly provide their image duplicator with an origin story. The show picks up in the 1940s, well before the onset of the Pop movement, with Lichtenstein’s time as a graduate student at Ohio State University. He spent time in Hoyt L. Sherman’s Visual Demonstration Center, where students learned in the dark as they were shown a succession of images meant to test how much they could perceive from the projections. The goal was to understand “perceptual unity,” as Sherman described it, and in a video Da Corte made for the exhibition, the co-curator imagines what it might have been like for Lichtenstein to see so many pictures nearly a century ago.

One might have expected Lichtenstein to opt for Op art as a result, but instead, he ultimately went Pop. Largely eliding Lichtenstein’s so-so abstractions of the 1950s, the show zooms forward to the ’60s, where one can see him directing mind-bending aesthetic strategies toward a visual language that recalls advertising. Here, one can find Golf Ball (1961), whose rounded surface is represented with rows of warping crescents. Through the ball’s circular shape and its lack of color, the painting knowingly winks at Piet Mondrian’s Composition 10 in Black and White (1915), then defiles the Dutch modernist’s aesthetic purity.

Such a gesture was something akin to a middle finger to abstraction at a time when most critics still prized it as the highest art form. (Lichtenstein would soon tackle Abstract Expressionism in much the same way, his brushstroke paintings of the mid-1960s being “a depiction of a grand gesture,” as he once put it.) But Lichtenstein also smartly directed his attention to artists that had themselves experimented with seriality, including Claude Monet, whose Rouen Cathedral paintings Lichtenstein remade with benday dots. One of Lichtenstein’s takes on Monet in this show features the cathedral buried beneath a matrix of black dots set atop a deep blue background, in what may count as an allusion to Ad Reinhardt’s blue-on-blue abstractions of the ’50s.

The Whitney reaches its apex somewhere around the Rouen Cathedral works and never quite again reaches the heights of that series. The show amasses an entire gallery of “Mirror” paintings from the ’70s, each depicting a circle of glass covered in dots, and a range of works produced between the ’70s and ’90s depicting artists’ studios in modes that variously recall Matisse and Picasso. There are also a few landscapes, including 1996’s Treetops Through the Fog, which takes its cues from both comics and the Chinese shanshui style of painting. But neither of these bodies of work thrill because they lack the barbs of Lichtenstein’s ’60s work, whose appropriations are more direct and therefore more striking.

My advice is to skim the last third of the show and head outdoors to see one of the show’s finest copies. On the Whitney’s facade, there’s a version of Lichtenstein’s mural for the 1963 New York World’s Fair Mural, a large version of the painting Girl in Window. (The source painting is one of many Lichtensteins held by the Whitney, which also owns the artist’s studio and now uses it as the home of its Independent Study Program.) Da Corte and his studio assistants personally painted this 32-foot-tall remake, which doubles as both a loving homage and a means of raising a great work to new heights. To quote Erle Loran once more, “A copy of anything, even when blown up to the monumental size of a billboard, is still a copy.” Fair enough, as this work demonstrates, but is that really such a bad thing?