Roy Lichtenstein - Live with art

In the article "Roy Lichtenstein's path to fame", this was depicted, and how the whole ended, namely in an almost incredible increase in value of his works of value. Lichtenstein had to wait a long time for his works of art to have it at all:

Life and art or life for art? Lichtenstein tried it

Roy Lichtenstein was almost 40 years old when he was able to experience his artistic breakthrough, and there were also reasons for this fact: Lichtenstein had never lined up among the thoroughbred artists whose lives from art studies and art and spend time with artists and creative industries and consists of nothing else.

Lichtenstein was an artist and normal-he began training as a normal (teacher) profession and was called to the military, he could not use the fact that the military had led him to Paris as planned for his artistic training (and acquaintance with Picasso) because he had to go back home because of a serious illness.

He ended his teacher training at Ohio State University after the war and then started studying for the Master of Fine Arts , but in 1949 his "free development as an artist" put another obstacle in his way by getting married and getting two sons with his wife Isabel Wilson in the next few years.

So Lichtenstein was responsible for the diet of a family, and in the 1950s he worked in all possible jobs that served less of his artistic development and more living.

In the first part of his life, he really did not have endless time to deal with artistic experiments and his own style - he took part in the real, plump life, which also does not make it easy for a creative to develop extremely fine -tied artistic ideas.

Wake up, Lichtenstein! Or: What a new job can do

This life in Ohio with occasional, owed trips to New York, 750 km away, might have gone so forever if Lichtenstein had not accepted a teaching work at the Rutgers University in New Jersey in 1960. Because here he came into a concentrated creative environment and met all the artists who are now one of the "fathers of pop art" .

Some of the most important contemporary artists had gathered at the University of Ohio: Jim Dine and Claes Oldenburg, Lucas Samaras and George Segal, George Brecht and Geoffrey Hendricks, Dick Higgins and his wife Allison Knowles, George Maciunas and Robert Whitman, everyone in New Jersey on the Rutgers University campus is about two professors: Allan Kaprow , the "inventor of the happening" , Robert Watts , sculptor and expressionist and fluxus friend.

Lichtenstein also inspired so much creativity and encouraged him to pursue the crazy of his ideas. So far, Lichtenstein's artistic expression was more of expressionism , the actual "artistic mainstream" of the time when Lichtenstein could not really classify between the two ruling schools: "Action Painting" or the "introverted expressionists" , which called "for meditation" with large -scale color orders.

The works that came out during these positioning attempts had definitely not been able to attract a lot of attention in the New York exhibitions, especially when he had more and more doubts about his style at the end of the 1950s.

Lichtenstein had already started experimenting comic characters and Disney characters Rather, these pictures were painted over by himself, he later admitted that he had classified them as "despairs". It's a shame, because these bugs Bunnys, Donald Ducks and Mickey Mouses would probably not have earned him a lot of money so many years later.

Because when Lichtenstein was now infected by the ideas of the creative things around him, the result of this experiment phase was that he deliberately "forgot" his previously acquired artistic ability and was the first to create such a "comic picture" without an expressionist impact.

This was born with the typical Lichtenstein style, "Look Mickey" followed some other pictures in this new style in the same summer 1961, in which he combined clear and strong lines delimited images with plain-colored areas, imitated elements of industrial printing technology (Ben-Day-Dots) and the speech bubble known from the comic.

In the fall of 1961, Professor Kaprow gave him an appointment with Ivan Karp, the director of the trendy New York Leo Castelli Gallery , which Lichtenstein presented some of his pictures in the new style. Karp assessed the pictures as promising and therefore showed his boss Leo Castelli, at the "Girl with Ball" Castelli is said to have decided to represent Lichtenstein, "Look Mickey" , the only image of a comic character, he was not shown by Karp.

Lichtenstein "on everyone's mouth" - almost unthinkable without Castelli

Perhaps it was the injunction that Lichtenstein's career made possible, because Andy Warhol had started to process comic characters in his art at the same time that he is said to have shown these comic pictures in the Castelli gallery and was thus rejected. On the other hand - Castelli's rejection and the accommodation of the comics by Lichtenstein are said to have caused Warhol to turn away from the comics and the consumer goods, and today he is the No. 1 in the "Eternal Ranking of Art", and Roy Lichtenstein only in place # 23.

But all of that comes much later, now in 1961 Lichtenstein managed to stay in one of the most sought -after New York galleries, and it went up steeply: the first pictures were sold quickly, his first solo exhibition was sold out before it was opened, Lichtenstein was now able to live from his pictures.

He then completely reorganized his life: the hinterland winter, which was broken together by a decade, the years of the existence struggle or otherwise worn marriage to Isabel Wilson, Lichtenstein moved to the art center New York, he got to know other greats of pop art like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns and only concentrated on painting. Castelli had good connections to Europe, through his former wife Ileana Saturday Lichtenstein was also made known in Europe.

Active production in Lichtenstein style

That was it - in the 1960s Lichtenstein became more and more famous, in 1963 his most famous picture "Whaam!" , which already hangs in the Tate Modern in London in 1966. In the following period he created a variety of works of art, devoted himself to a wide variety of subject areas, sculptures and installations of art objects and often painted in series.

Perhaps in a conscious demarcation to Andy Warhol, Lichtenstein never used photographs as templates, but continues to relate on comic series or commercial printed products such as the business directory from which "Girl with Ball" was created, and he always produced visibly in a special Lichtenstein style.

In the early work, he had tried many topics, with partially understandable templates and, with the inclusion of very simple objects, he was influenced by the new flood of commercial advertising for new tools. This created pictures such as "Sock" ("Sock") , "Roto Broil" ("Frite Sure") and "Washing Mashine" ("washing machine") , all from 1961, all of which were condemned by art critics, but were enthusiastic about the new and subtle representation of Castelli's customers.

Lichtenstein targeted the connection between art and commerce , a first highlight was the first highlight of the image "Art" from 1962, which was no longer than this word on almost two square meters. This was followed by abstractions of the comic style, which reminded Picasso's pictures, ceramic and metal sculptures and landscape paintings and brushstack series, the composition of colored areas with strong black border and dotted areas remained.

The big exhibitions begin with this production: In 1964 Lichtenstein was the first American to be exhibited in the London Tate Gallery , in 1967 the first retrospective of his works took place in the Pasadena Art Museum in California and its first solo exhibition in Europe, which moves to Amsterdam, London, Bern and Hanover. In 1968 Lichtenstein took part in the Documenta (IV) in Kassel , in 1969 the first retrospective followed at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

The time of honors, exhibitions and collections

In 1969 Lichtenstein was also commissioned by Gunter Sachs to paint "Leda and the Swan" for the pop art suite of his Palace Hotel in St. Moritz In 1970 he became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and buys a coache in Southampton on Long Island, where he builds a studio and spends a time of relative seclusion.

In the following decade, there was not much new to his style, he discovered the visual illusions and made a wide variety of still lifes, also dealt with art history and painted pictures based on the model of famous artists, such as the "Red Horseman" after the template Carlo Cararràs and 1980 the "Forest Scene" to Claude Monet.

As early as the early 1960 years, Lichtenstein had reproduced masterpieces by Cézanne, Picasso and Mondrian. In total, he made more than 100 interpretations of well -known paintings of famous colleagues, the exhibition "Roy Lichtenstein. Art as a motive." In 2010 in the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, this page of the artist dealt.

The journey offered here by Lichtenstein's work touches cubism and expressionism, futurism and modernity, from the style of the 1930s to minimal way and abstract painting . Lichtenstein does not copy, but finds such interesting personal interpretations for his new edition of the classics that his exclusive reduction to comic pop type is presumably regret.

During this time, Lichtenstein also processed his own works, in which Artist's Studio series was created in 1973 and 1974 "Artist's Studio, Look Mickey" and other new editions. In addition, there was further commissioned work, a kind of car for car manufacturers BMW in 1977, a sculpture lamp for the church of St. Mary's in Georgia in 1978 and the "Mermaid" , a public mission in 1979, it is now in front of the Fillmore Miami Beach at Jackie Gleason Theater. In 1977 Lichtenstein also received his first honorary doctor, California Institute of the Arts, in 1980 he was appointed honorary doctor by Southampton College.

In the 1980s, Lichtenstein obviously had enough of the comics and turns more to its roots again, so landscapes such as "Sunrise" from 1984 and "Landscape with Red Roof" from 1985 and a whole series of "Landscape Sketches" . Further public orders come in: In 1984 the sculpture "Brushstrokes" , which is located on the Port Columbus International Airport, was created the "Mural with Blue Brushstrokes" at the Equitible Center in New York, 1992 on the occasion of the Olympic Games the sculpture "El Cap" in Barcelona and 1994 the huge mural in the subway station "Times Square" in New York.

And further honors: In 1987 he became an honorary doctor at Ohio State University, in 1993 he received the honorary doctor of the Royal College of Art, in 1995 the Kyoto Prize and the American "National Medal of the Arts" were awarded, in 1996 he became an honorary doctor of the Washington University of Washington DC, overall he received several awards.

Lichtenstein's last work was ironically a company logo, for DreamWorks Records and in a typical style, although Lichtenstein had now so far away from his comic pictures. If a viewer discovers a contradiction here, it would certainly not bother the artist who died in 1997, Lichtenstein never took too seriously: "I don't think that whatever is meant by it is imported to art" ("Whatever my work puts my work - I don't think it is important for art") is a known quote from him (to find in the book "Roy Lichtenstein" by John Coplans, appeared in 1972 in the Praeger publishing house in New York, p. 54.).

The criticism is said to have been really violent, e.g. For example, the "Life Magazine" overwritten an article with the question of whether Lichtenstein "The Worst Artist in the Us" (the worst artist in the USA), the legendary is also the saying of the famous comic author and Pulitzer-Prize support Art Spiegelman , according to the "Lichtenstein did not no more or less for comics Than Andy Warhol Did for Soup." (“Lichtenstein did as much or little for comics as Andy Warhol for soup”).

Lichtenstein is said to have occasionally admitted that criticism has sometimes violated him, but is described as a friendly overall and in relation to his evaluation of pronounced relaxed interlocutors.

Works of art by Roy Lichtenstein on Pinterest

Unsightly reverberation

If you assume the prices that are paid for a “Lichtenstein” today, it really had every reason to serenity - the million sums paid during his lifetime have been around approximately since then.

It is all the more regrettable when, in 2013, over decades and a half after the death of the artist, alleged “muses” appear who, without any respect for the almost three decades of second marriage in Lichtenstein on the eve, would like to make a great retrospective of his works from acquaintance with the artist.

Or when the gallery owner who represented Lichtenstein at the end of his life and has since marketed his estate, especially with legal disputes about Lichtenstein's art ...

about this gallery owner , but that is another topic about which there will be something to read soon.