The Brooklyn Rail

Roy Lichtenstein, A Centennial Exhibition at the Albertina is a retrospective of over ninety paintings, sculptures, and works on paper. The Lichtenstein Foundation, which in 2018 announced its scheduled closure, has recently donated 95 works to the museum and is one of the exhibition sponsors.

“What can you paint that isn’t ridiculous from the outset?”
–Roy Lichtenstein

I felt a slight shock when I turned to the catalogue page reproducing a 1961 Lichtenstein painting of Popeye slugging Brutus. Was that the same painting hanging near a piano over fifty years ago in the artist’s family home—or was it Look Mickey, the seminal masterpiece also painted that year? Look Mickey had convinced Leo Castelli into offering Lichtenstein representation (cited also as the reason the dealer refused Andy Warhol the same).

It has been kismet to revisit that time and place in a conversation with Mitchell Lichtenstein, the artist’s younger son, to discuss the retrospective, Super 8 films, and the origins of Lichtenstein’s comic strip paintings.

In 1965, I met Mitchell Lichtenstein, who had just moved into our slightly dreary neighborhood in Princeton, New Jersey. We quickly became friends. Mitchell and his brother David came from the Rutgers suburb of Highland Park, where their father had been teaching. We were both from divorced families, unusual for the time and perhaps one source of our precocious antics. Our connection was art, or at least our version of art. We made Super 8 films, drew Mad Magazine-style books, or listened to David’s drumming. There was also their pet monkey, whose constant vocalizations were like the soundtrack of an old safari film.

Roy’s periodic day visits from NY were exciting, especially if I was invited to join them for a ride in his new green cabriolet MG sports car. I also remember the brothers fighting for a turn at the record player with their mother, Isabel Wilson, who had stacks of James Brown 45s. Other afternoons stretched past dinner, when Isabel ventured out to lunch at Lahiere’s, Princeton’s scaled-down version of La Côte Basque, always stylish when returning in her friend’s black E-Type Jaguar.

Once, we were ratted out for distributing one of our hand-drawn, crude pornographic magazines, a drama that subsided as quickly as it had started, like most dramas of the era.

CONVERSATION AT ALBERTINA

Mitchell Lichtenstein is an award-winning film director, writer, and actor, who has had his indie horror movie Teeth adapted into a stage musical by Michael R. Jackson and Anna K. Jacobs, playing at the National Alliance for the Musical Theatre, NY, through April 28, 2024.

Steven Pollock (Rail): I wanted to ask which works you remembered being in your house in Princeton when we met around 1965. Roy was still teaching at Rutgers, or maybe he was taking a leave and living in New York.

Mitchell Lichtenstein: It has to be 1965, and I realized it was Popeye, not Look Mickey.

Rail: Whichever painting it was hung by the piano. By the entrance to the kitchen there was a small Wimpy, next to the rec. room. That room had all of the fun stuff, like a pinball machine.

Lichtenstein: Yes, there was that hanging Pod Chair from the World’s Fair in there.

Rail: A second important work was hanging on the wall before the kitchen. Could it have been Masterpiece or In the Car?

Lichtenstein: Not Masterpiece, but In the Car would have been there. It was of a couple driving, as seen from profile without text. With Masterpiece, they are also in profile while looking at his painting. We can’t see the painting itself, but it has that famous blurb. (“WHY, BRAD DARLING, THIS PAINTING IS A MASTERPIECE!”) 

Rail: Don’t forget Crak! on paper, with its word balloon in French, and the Sunset hanging in the kitchen.

Lichtenstein: Do you remember you appeared in one of our Super 8 movies? Have you seen it?

Rail: Is that the one where I die laughing? Does it have any narrative?

Lichtenstein: I mean, yeah. [Laughs] In that one, you become a Dracula type of character, and then, maybe with my brilliant acting, I take some sort of poison and have a not-so-subtle reaction. David was filming. I don’t recall him being in it.

Rail: How long is the finished work?

Lichtenstein: It’s a two-and-a-half-hour feature—[laughter]. No, it’s a few minutes. I think David edited it. We had our little editing thing, with the tape. 

Rail: The last I heard David was in LA working with John Cale. 

Lichtenstein: He played drums with him. 

Rail: Which brings me to Andy Warhol. Back then, you gave me a copy of his Index book, which I no longer have. Roy got it from Andy and gave it to you, and you gave it to me. We just had to try all of the little printing gimmicks. Wherever it said cut here, we cut. A lost treasure.

What are your thoughts regarding a Warhol/Lichtenstein rivalry? Isn’t it more of a Beatles vs. Stones thing, exaggerated by the press?

Lichtenstein: Certainly on my father’s side, there was no rivalry. I remember my mother said that Andy would visit us. Much later as an adult, I would drop by the Interview offices or see him at clubs.

Rail: In photo sessions from the era, Roy looks like a playboy counterpart to the comic strip beauties. I recall him as stylish, but did he really cultivate that?

Lichtenstein: There are things I didn’t know. It’s tough to see your father that way, but there were old photos from the sixties of other artists, such as Rauschenberg, and they all have some kind of James Dean style.

Rail: I have read about his working habits. He seemed so professional in comparison. Was it always like that?

Lichtenstein: It was always like that. His only interests were painting, drawing, and working. He didn’t want an entourage like Andy, and didn’t drink to excess like some others. His only vice was work. 

Rail: What about his teacher at Ohio State, Hoyt L. Sherman? I read that Sherman invented his perceptual systems for the military within days after Pearl Harbor. His lab (known as the “flash room”) evolved from a successful pitch to the military “to teach soldiers to see like Rembrandt.” Could that have inspired Mad Scientist or Image Duplicator from 1963?

Lichtenstein: I don’t remember if my father tried to duplicate Sherman’s device (a tachistoscope), but he almost always drew without looking at the page. Every once in a while, I would take drawing lessons from Roy—which was fun. It was about not seeing what you were drawing—everything was about the mark on the page. It didn’t matter whether it was abstract or representational; it was only the mark. I guess that’s the same with composition, whether a harmonious composition or when the subject matter is the material.

Rail: What about the captions? Did he ever talk to you about them? Especially onomatopoeia, like WHAAM!, CRAK! and POW!?

Lichtenstein: I don’t remember him saying much.

Rail: According to Leo Castelli, Roy told him Look Mickey was painted to prove to you and David that he could draw, not just paint abstractly. Some even said Donald and Mickey were disguised references to your initials, D & M.

Lichtenstein: I’ve only heard the stories, I can’t verify them because we were too young. He did those paintings in 1961, when we all lived together before Princeton. I would have seen them in the studio. 

Rail: The retrospective concludes with the monumental Beach Scene with Starfish (1995), occupying an entire wall. I see the “Nudes Series” as a book-end to his oeuvre, beginning with Girl with Ball (1961). Like mannequins, the women each bare a cartoon idea of a woman’s crotch. What’s behind the Y-shaped presentations? He must have found that amusing.

Lichtenstein: He did! He was amused by people who found them sexy, as they were just paint and cartoon anatomy. He was definitely amused by their popularity. Extra amusing because, again, they are blond girls with cartoon boobs— nude but abstract.

Rail: He also described the tropes of the war works as ludicrous—equally, Picasso’s eighties nudes are ludicrous. The three little asterisk marks on the beachball of Beach Scene could reference Picasso’s shorthand for an orifice.

Lichtenstein: [Laughs] Yes, they were into making the fewest marks.

Rail: About the blondes… there have been dramatic interpretations of Lichtenstein’s women, and he said they are a comic shorthand for beauty. You once even showed me how to draw Roy-style, a nose, explaining all I needed was to make a small horizontal line shaped like a seagull.

Lichtenstein: [Laughs] Yes, he was very into depicting a woman, or what we read as a nose, with a single line. 

Rail: Are male collectors smug regarding Lichtenstein women? For 165 million one might have the ultimate blonde trophy, preferably dated early.

Lichtenstein: I know, it’s almost sick.

Rail: They may own the art, but not what it depicts.

Lichtenstein: Right—they have a chance. But they would have to give up the painting in the divorce. [Laughs]

Epilogue

In Joan Didion’s bleak examination of the 1960s, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, she states that the phrases from Yeats’s 1919 poem, “The Second Coming,”, “widening gyre” and a “center which cannot hold,” became surgically implanted in her mind.

Lichtenstein’s work didn’t focus on the sixties per se, but his paradoxical art methods also coincided with the atomization of American society and the nuclear family. When seeing Lichtenstein, the viewer should pay equal attention to what is not visible. Starting with Look Mickey, dozens of works employ water motifs, most notably 1963’s Drowning Girl, in which Lichtenstein referred to the tsunami of Hokusai’s Great Wave (ca. 1830–32), as elemental as the fiery explosions of the war paintings.

Lichtenstein’s marks are as frightening as they are mirthful. His Kiss with Cloud (1964) painted just two years after the Cuban missile crisis, is cropped so tightly that the entire brush on the lips is out of the picture. A military hat and cloud dominate the somber toned scene, while an off camera light source flashes so brightly that the soldier’s patent leather visor reflects his lover’s blonde hair, like yellow flames against a stark landscape.

For Lichtenstein’s magnum opus, Beach Scene with Starfish (1995), the painter chose the water’s edge for the action. At 3 by 6 meters, the painting offers near-immersive viewing. Frozen in flight, at the apex of its Cézanne-styled triangular composition, a ball has been propelled by two colorless “mean-girl” nudes on the right, knocking a pair of anxious Betty blondes off their feet.

The ball game has evolved from 1961’s Girl with Ball into a threatening yet enticing beach movie nightmare. Are the three barely disguised graphic symbols on the ball numerically coinciding with the six triangular sections of the yellow and black ionizing radiation symbol? Are the Benday dots raining from the sky in an uninterrupted pattern through the girls’ bodies actually fallout? What should the viewer make of the diagonal painted passage of black and yellow stripes—known as the colors of the global radiation symbol—sealing off a changing room? Could changing room experiments have contaminated this tumultuous seascape?

The dirty yellow and peach-toned sky, pentangular starfish and buckets of sand look like they would make for a quick Geiger counter click. The hurling beach ball is a central sphere of ambiguity, quoting Picasso-like orifices of the 1930s. Beach Scene has a plethora of representations set against a stylized Asiatic volcanic background which happens to echo a mushroom cloud first seen in Lichtenstein’s Atomic Landscape (1966), painted for the Peace Tower protest exhibition against the Vietnam War.

Like a soldier trained to watch Bikini Atoll through Rembrandt’s eyes, Roy Lichtenstein, arguably art’s greatest humorist, takes us from the ridiculous to the sublime. As an artist who repeatedly swore that his works were purely abstract, devoid of message, Lichtenstein’s work may have been full of mantic allusions and meditations over our civilization’s fragile future.