Today, I got to see an artist I have long admired in person.
I had the distinct pleasure of seeing The Roy Lichtenstein Retrospective at the Tate Modern.
I was stunned by the scale and scope of his body of work and can’t wait to go back and see it again.
Lichtenstein is best known for his comic-book inspired paintings but was also a brilliant draftsman.
This exhibit includes drawings, paintings, sculptures, prints and large-scale installations that span his career from the late 1950s to 1977 when he stopped creating art.
His “doodle” drawings were somewhat of a revolution in draftsmanship: they brought Pop Art into the realm of fine art.
He also incorporated traditional painting techniques into his work, which gave it a realism that at first glance made it indistinguishable from photographs.
The exhibit is open until September 2nd so if you’re ever in London I highly recommend going to see it!
I was in London last week, and saw the Roy Lichtenstein retrospective at the Tate Modern. I’m not the biggest fan of this artist (his work tends to all look the same to me), but my husband is an art history major so he’s a big fan. I’ve seen quite a few of his pieces of work before and thought it’d be fun to see them live. Big mistake.
This was a great exhibit and I highly recommend it if you’re in London and enjoy modern art. The exhibit is on display now until January 10, 2011.
Roy Lichtenstein was a great artist, and I regret that I never had the chance to see his work in person prior to his death. Happily, London has one last opportunity to do so. The Tate Modern is hosting a retrospective of his work, and it is not to be missed.
The first time I ever heard of Roy Lichtenstein’s art was from my mother. She had a book that contained reproductions of some of his early works. She’d look through the book occasionally, and when she did I would always glance over her shoulder and read the titles of some of the works. One day we were at a museum and I saw one of those pictures for real; it was as if all the others I’d seen in the book had come alive.I could barely believe that people could make things like that; it seemed impossible to me. Looking at them filled me with an intense sense of joy and wonder, and they’ve been doing so ever since.
Tate Modern’s exhibition is titled “Roy Lichtenstein: Look Now,” and this will probably be your last chance to do so in person. This retrospective includes all of Lichtenstein’s major works up through 1977, which means you can see them while they’re still new enough
If you are a fan of the pop-art master Roy Lichtenstein, I can’t imagine anything more exciting than visiting the new retrospective at London’s Tate Modern. In case you aren’t familiar with his work, he is best known for paintings and etchings of comic-book images—most famously, his 1960s series of images from DC Comics’ All-American Men of War. This show includes 25 major pieces as well as a number of preparatory drawings and sketches.
Why was this so exciting? I have always loved Lichtenstein’s work but never been able to see it in person. When I was a child, his paintings (and Andy Warhol’s) were too expensive for my parents to buy for the house or even to display at home. We had some art on the walls—a small Kandinsky and a large Klee print—but most of what we had was photography: beautiful black-and-white images of plants and animals, mostly taken by my father. In college, I decided that I couldn’t afford to collect art myself because it wasn’t worth the extra time spent working to pay for it (that is, after all, how people who don’t make art get most of their art). Later in life, I
Roy Lichtenstein was one of the most influential and popular figures in American art in the second half of the 20th century. In the 60s and 70s, he revitalised Pop Art, a movement that had been around since the late 50s but which was not particularly successful until he came along.
The artist’s challenge at this point in his career was to find a way to continue to pursue his avant-garde ideas without losing any of his commercial popularity, which he did by moving toward abstraction. Largely inspired by Édouard Manet and Pablo Picasso, he began producing large-scale paintings that referenced both Modernism and Pop Art.
One of Lichtenstein’s most famous pieces, Whaam! is part of the Tate Modern’s retrospective on his work. The painting depicts a fighter plane firing a rocket at another plane and is considered one of his most important works.
The exhibition runs until September 7th and is well worth the trip if you are in London at this time.**
Over the past decade and a half, I have been fortunate enough to see a lot of great art in person. The Hermitage. The Louvre. The National Gallery of Art. The Prado. New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The National Gallery in Washington, D.C. Museums all over the world, really: Venice, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Rome, Madrid, Barcelona, Lisbon; Basel, Zurich, and Geneva in Switzerland; Edinburgh and Glasgow in Scotland; Copenhagen and Malmo in Denmark; Ljubljana and Zagreb in Croatia; Vilnius in Lithuania; Tallinn and Riga in Estonia; Moscow and St Petersburg (more than once); Kiev and Odessa in Ukraine; Beirut and Damascus in Lebanon…
Whether you’re interested in art or not – whether you like it or not – I can’t think of a better way to spend three hours than walking around the Tate Modern (on Bankside near London Bridge) with the legendary curator John Elderfield. We started at the beginning – room after room full of early Lichtenstein paintings – which sorta blew my mind. These were paintings that I’d seen in books and online but never dreamed I’d be able to stand next to – let alone see
Though I’d been looking forward to this exhibition for months, it was not at all what I expected. And that’s a good thing.
The main reason I was looking forward to it so much was because of the “Brushstrokes” series and thinking about the way that this artist used that technique with such ease. The works in this series are the most famous, and perhaps my favorite, pieces in the show. What I didn’t realize until seeing them in person is how ridiculously large they actually are.
I don’t mean to imply that they were small, just smaller than I thought they would be. However, when you are only a few feet away from these pieces, they are massive! And it is amazing to think that someone painted these on canvas in 1964.