The Brooklyn Rail

Gagosian’s show, Painting with Scattered Brushstrokes, surveys a suite of paintings, works on paper, and a sculpture that artist Roy Lichtenstein executed throughout the 1970s and ’80s, each rendering the stroke as a delineated Pop motif. This highly inventive body of work is of significant philosophical value. It bears its most important theoretical fruit in works such as Forest Scene with Temple (1986), a painting in which Lichtenstein counterposes the thick, wending stroke with Ben-Day dot indices of comic Popism. In autotomizing the chief expressivist element wielded by the Abstract Expressionists of the preceding decades and contouring its putatively perfunctory fascicles into thick, bold, and iterative Pop elements, Lichtenstein transmogrifies the vehicle that was conceived by modernist theorists to be the constitutive particle of painting into a self-standing form. In so doing, Lichtenstein sets up a constructive opposition between the two competing twentieth-century movements.

Lichtenstein is not the first Pop artist to moonlight as an Abstract Expressionist and, in so doing, productively plumb the latter movement’s modus operandi. Just several years earlier, Andy Warhol had executed his “Oxidation” and “Piss” abstractions, propounding the phallus as a paintbrush. But where Warhol’s urinal splatter-skeins were, like Jackson Pollock’s paroxysmal drips, unwieldy and bespattered across the picture plane, Lichtenstein’s strokes are contained. This principle of the contained stroke is simply yet perspicaciously treated in the painted and patinated bronze sculpture, Brushstroke (1982), which inaugurates the show. A wending series of five edge-defined and variously sized strokes is stacked atop one another into a backward L-shape. A short, banana-yellow crown stroke outlined in black weeps an outward, inky dribble. The larger blue-white crest and carmine strokes that balance it jut into grooved parcels. The totemic configuration figures as a composite schema constituted of the cartoonized brushstroke.

With his vernacular “cartoonization,” Lichtenstein transforms the medium-specific building blocks of painting qua painting—which the high modernist project theorized as its guiding telos—into figurative elements. In treating it as both a divisible and integrable element, Lichtenstein demonstrates that the stroke might well be an atomistic “simple” element but distances himself from the Abstract Expressionist paradigm’s thoroughgoing presumption that the stroke is a sui generis painterly mark. The latter position is voiced by Franz Kline’s reflections on his fellow Abstract Expressionist traveler, Bradley Walker Tomlin’s approach, espying “how individual brushstrokes could come together to form powerful graphic signs without losing their character as painterly marks.” Lichtenstein, on the other hand, denies the distinction between a graphic sign and a painterly mark.

It would be all too easy to treat Lichtenstein’s work as a kind of pastiche of Abstract Expressionism. This is, in fact, how art historian Graham Bader, who is quoted in the accompanying exhibition catalogue, understands Lichtenstein’s series. Bader writes:

“Pastiche encompasses the insistent pastness and focus on divergent styles of Lichtenstein’s later practice: his veritable cataloguing of the lexicon of marks bequeathed to him by the history of art at whose end he stood (and whose future chapters he helped initiate).”

If one wanted to restrict oneself to pastiche, it would be worth mentioning that Pop can appropriate Abstract Expressionism, but the latter cannot appropriate the former. However, Lichtenstein’s lesson is far more philosophical than mere academic “cataloguing,” nor does it traffic in trifling, parodic imitation. Altering the short brushstroke by magnifying and monumentalizing its size while outlining its silhouette, Lichtenstein’s graphic Pop marks separate the painterly swipe’s bristles into curved, rectilinear, and bowed bisected fragments that are stamped across the pictorial field. At times, as in Woman with Hat (1986), Boy with Hat (1986), and River Scene (1987), they coalesce into diagrammed clouds, rolling hills, or forest studies; elsewhere, as in Painting with Scattered Brushstrokes (1984), the strokes are pothered into cross-hatched flurries. By retaining the stroke as a self-same repeatable element, Lichtenstein ultimately demonstrates that Abstract Expressionism’s approach to composition remains beholden to objectival figuration. Figuration-cum-representation, then, is inseparable from the painterly pursuit, as the latter inevitably hews towards depicting some X and, in so doing, treats that X as predicable, referential, and thus itself a pictorial unit. The difference-making factor between portraiture, landscape painting, or the stroke study, then, is a matter of scale rather than kind.

This is best demonstrated in studies like Sailboat (1981) and Reclining Nude in Brushstroke Landscape (1986), where Lichtenstein reduces classical motifs and genres such as the odalisque figure to stroke-compounded amalgamations. In Sailboat, which remains exemplary, the titular dinghy and its surrounding hurtling waves are all rendered in faint yellow, blue, and gray stroke-driven forms (with the boat’s sail marked by an outlier claret virgule). Variance is only to be found in the stroke’s width, length, or palette, with the form broadly retained throughout.

The sole shortcoming of Lichtenstein’s series is its inability to address the second, supposed, medium-specific condition of painting qua painting: the structure of the support. Though the latter project was taken up by artists like Ron Gorchov and Frank Stella, one wonders what the unified schematization of stroke and canvas could evince. Unfortunately, Lichtenstein sidelines the canvas as its own self-same unit.

In his 2011 Artforum essay, “Emptied Gesture: Roy Lichtenstein’s ‘Brushstrokes,’” Bader notes that “the gestural mark functions in the narrative as a way for the artist-protagonist to both cancel out his taunting picture and, in essence, announce defeat.” However, if Lichtenstein’s thesis, that what Abstract Expressionism declaims as conditioning painterly representation is, in fact, just as much bound to the ultimately inescapable, objectival trellis, then the “stroke” series announces Pop’s conceptual victory (rather than defeat) over Action painting. Lichtenstein is thus most successful in works where he flanks the constituent stroke with markedly Pop elements so as to encase the stroke and, in so doing, convert that which supposedly archives movement and brings to bear the conditions of painting into a mere, scale-specific unit of representation. It is here, where the stroke underwrites Pop’s motifs, that the latter movement’s victory resounds.