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Dorothy Lichtenstein >> Well there are a few early things that
were done before I met Roy. I met Roy in nineteen sixty four, but it's
really like going through
our life together.
I look at things and i think it's amazing how
contemporary
thing still looks to me. I mean, so many things look as if they,
you know, artists could be doing them
today. I mean, you know, they're
fresh,
they're bright, and they look
of the moment to me.
He worked very hard to
transcend, say, a comic image
and make it into
something that really worked as a formal painting.
I think he also wanted them to realize what a bizarre idea it was to freeze
something that was so fluid and paint a brush stroke, so
there was a certain irony that he'd really
hope people would get. But
the range of his subject matter
is extraordinary.
Pop got everyone's attention because it looked so
non art-like.
I mean even Roy said
when he did his first cartoon painting
he had to get beyond the level of his own style
and sense of
what art was, because it
simply didn't look like art.
I really love Roy's work
that clearly work on two levels,
so they tend to be more abstract
like the mirrors,
the representation of the mirror in
an advertisement is really a
complete abstraction.
And i hope that when people come through the
exhibition
they will
really realize how expansive his range was.
Harry Cooper >> This is the first retrospective since his death so he is really part of
history now in another way.
And we also can show some of his very late work that people don't know
so well and
look at it in the context of his whole career
"Look Mickey,"
nineteen sixty one,
this is the painting that the artist
calls his first Pop painting, so
in a way his
career begins here and it's at the beginning of our exhibition.
It was shocking painting at the time. It's not a shocking painting now because we're so used to
pop art, but at the time the idea of
taking a frame from
comic strip,
blowing it up, putting it on the wall in a
gallery was really shocking.
One of the interesting things about the painting
is that it's actually not from a comic strip, although it looks that way.
He took an illustration from a Disney children's book, a
rather delicate kind of a wash drawing, and he changed it. One of the things about
Lichtenstein is that he never copied, he
never just imitated. He was always making
small changes, improving things, and
in this case he made it look cruder, more Pop,
than it was in the first place. So he was really after a
kind of style. He was trying to define a look
and this is where he starts. You can see the
dots,
his famous dots just emerging here in
the eyes of Donald, the face of Mickey.
Those dots will then become bigger, more prominent,
more regular,
more mechanical,
and they stay with him for the rest of his career.
Lichtenstein loved to work in series, and that
makes him perfect for
an exhibition in a series of rooms, so in
each room we have a different
series. So i would encourage people to, you know, get up as
close as you can and
really look at these not just as images, we know a lot of the images, but look at them as painted objects.
Along with Warhol he really defined Pop Art
for America.
He took popular
imagery and he rebranded it, and
it became popular in a whole other way. It became popular as high art
and it continues, I think,
to challenge us to look again at all of the
visual culture
around us.
We can hopefully enjoy the show,
have fun with it. It's very humorous.
There's a lot of joking, a lot of irony,
but there is a serious claim that there is beauty
out there where you might not expect it.