Today I bring you another of the greats of Pop Art, many will wonder why I take out of the drawer artists who are no longer among us, because to remember is to live, and the basic rule of culture is to repeat some activity in a sustained manner through time, so to speak is my activity and with it a tribute to the great artists who have collaborated with demonstrating that the human is not only consumption and destruction. So, today it's Roy Fox Lichtenstein's turn, one of the promoters of pop art.
Born in New York in 1923, acclaimed by critics as one of the most influential painters of Pop Art, a trend that in my opinion marked a milestone in world history, and also a movement that I believe has not been fully understood by the new generations. Lichtenstein was a painter and sculptor and together with Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, they were among the first to massify art.
This author was undoubtedly one of the greatest exponents of American Pop Art, his works represent subjects such as consumer society, daily life, and mass culture, subjects that he drew directly from sources such as advertising, fashion magazines, and even comics. His aesthetic line was based on compositions and simple appearances mostly painted with primary colors. His work was based on a very harsh social critique of the contemporary world.
Not everything was to represent comics on a large scale, his beginnings were with an abstract expressionist style, this was in 1958, and in 1961 begins his stage of Pop Art.
His comics, like Good Morning, Darling were an extension of the hand drawings he made, with the dot technique (it consisted of a technique that imitated benday dots, an industrial printing process used in vignettes that, from small colored circles, represented chromatic variations) and the use of primary colours and bright tones also in his printing. Man-and-Woman-in-the-car.
Whaam! is his most famous work, born as an adaptation of DC Comics "All-American Men of War" where the narrative of war is completely explicit.
In his last works, in which the popular characters of the pink novel, the stylized landscapes and the copies of postcards of classic temples take on special relevance, we begin to notice the influences of artists like Matisse and Picasso.
In 1962 his first exhibition takes place in the Leo Castelli gallery, it was received with caution because it was a public that was not accustomed to seeing his daily world reduced to artistic subjects. Until 1980 his painting became more complex and almost at the end of his life he began to experiment with sculpture.
During his last years this author took more social presence and esteem in the museums of half the world, in fact in Spain we have two of his works, Woman bathing in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum and the sculpture that presides over the inner courtyard of Queen Sofia. In 1993, the Guggenheim Museum in New York held a retrospective, which traveled to many countries.
I have no doubt that Lichtenstein's art, above all, has served as a source of inspiration for other artists. But deep down I think that pop art has been misinterpreted by the masses and the artists themselves, who end up making works that are overvalued when the principle was to make art more accessible to able mediums and lows of the population who have historically been denied art.
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