Rendering №4

The article  Lichtenstein, at Tate Modern appeared in print in the 23 of February and it was written by Alastair Smart. This article is published on the site http://www.telegraph.co.uk. 
It should be noted that This monotonous retrospective reveals Roy Lichtenstein, the Pop Art pioneer, to have been rather a one-trick wonder. The author gave us the review of Tate’s Roy Lichtenstein retrospective by mentioning his struggles with claustrophobia. Most of Lichtenstein’s paintings, in a five-decade career till his death in 1997, felt to me oppressively similar. Theirs is a relentless, cartoonish aesthetic: all Ben-Day dots, thick black contours, and broad flat areas of bright primary colours. The author remind us that he took his inspiration from the cheaply printed, commercial imagery of newspaper ads and mail-order catalogues – seemingly carrying out a simple mechanical reproduction, but, in fact, painting everything by hand in a clean, deliberately depersonalised fashion. In 1963’s diptych Whaam! – reworked from an American war comic and enlarged to mimic a huge Ab Ex canvas – a fighter pilot blasts an enemy into flaming oblivion. Success came relatively late, in his late thirties (with careers as an art professor and painter of Wild West history scenes behind him) – but, when it did come, it was momentous. Some of his paintings even waggishly flaunt his success in traditionalists’ faces.It’s necessary to mention that Lichtenstein duly became a brand, lucrative but repetitive; a one-trick wonder, seemingly intent – after his long, early years as an outsider – to stick with a winning formula once he’d found it. Only really in his final series, of Song dynasty Chinese landscapes, is there a hint of variation: in 1996’s Landscape in Fog, an austere grid of dots marking a lake, mountain and sky is violated by bold gestural brushstrokes that capture a gathering fog. Probably the most telling work on show is Self-Portrait (1978). In conclusion it’s important to say that once the show had dealt with Lichtenstein’s intrepid breakthrough years, I found the monotony all too claustrophobic.