The most famous painting of women in America is “Whaam!” by Roy Lichtenstein. It depicts an American fighter pilot firing a rocket into the fuselage of a shocked North Vietnamese MiG-17.
It’s an image of the exuberance of Cold War power, replete with bright colors, thick lines, and bold iconography. It is one of the most instantly recognizable paintings in America, and there is nothing subtle about it.
But that’s not what Lichtenstein painted.
The story of the four paintings of women, which Roy Lichtenstein would paint and use as a part of his breakthrough into Pop Art, is one of the most interesting stories in modern art. The story begins with the anonymous artist who painted these women in the early 20th Century.
Lichtenstein found these four paintings at an estate sale in Florida and purchased them because they reminded him of the comic book illustrations he had seen as a child–a style he was interested in experimenting with.
Later, when Lichtenstein showed these paintings to Andy Warhol, Warhol suggested that Lichtenstein use them in his artwork. These paintings were then used as the inspiration for two of his most famous works, “Whaam!” and “Drowning Girl”.
The history of Pop Art is well documented. Its roots go back to the late 1940s and early 1950s, when a group of young New York City artists rejected Abstract Expressionism in favor of paintings that referred to popular culture. Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein were two of these artists.
In the early 1960s, Warhol was already well-known for his paintings of soup cans and other everyday objects. But he was still a relatively young artist, so he had to borrow subjects like Marilyn Monroe from more established painters. As he became more famous, Warhol started painting celebrities himself. He also started borrowing images from comic books and other sources that were closer to his own generation and the contemporary American experience.
Towards the end of 1962, shortly after his friend Candy Darling had given him her copy of My Hustler magazine, Warhol began work on this painting of Liz Taylor, one of the most famous women in America at that time. This painting is sometimes called Liz II because Warhol made several versions of it over the next couple years.
But why did Warhol paint Taylor? She was not particularly associated with Pop Art or any other movement; she wasn’t even an actress at that time but just a movie star. Perhaps she just
In the winter of 1963, Roy Lichtenstein spent a day staring at a cartoon in the New York Times.
The comic strip was a parody of “Look” magazine, complete with bubble captions. The characters were drawn in a simplified, formulaic style in primary colors. Lichtenstein sat transfixed as he read each panel.
“It’s like a combination of things,” he told his wife, Dorothy. “Like a movie and a cartoon.”
That night, as he lay in bed, the images continued to swirl around inside his head. He didn’t sleep for hours. It just may have been the most productive sleepless night in modern art history. The next morning, Lichtenstein sketched two panels from the comic strip on a piece of paper and went to work on one of his own paintings, which he titled “First Painting with Reflection.”
A month later, this painting was shown alongside works by Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns at an exhibition at Castelli’s Gallery in New York City called “Younger American Painters.” This show launched Pop Art and helped make Roy Lichtenstein famous.*
Women’s Lib may have been a big thing in the 1960s, but as far as Roy Lichtenstein was concerned, women were still just objects. In 1961 he painted “Look Mickey,” a cartoon-like depiction of two girls, one blonde and the other brunette, apparently talking to each other, but really only handmaidens to the male figures of Disney and the artist. The painting is less than six inches square, and it uses all of the visual clichés that would be used by Lichtenstein for the rest of his career: Benday dot patterns for shading; huge block letters to spell out a title; comic-book imagery.
The work is not an image of female empowerment. It’s simply a representation of women as sex objects. If anything, they’re objectified even more than they are in “Drowning Girl.”
Why do we like this? Why did Lichtenstein get away with it? The fact is that we can’t separate art from its cultural context any more than we can separate science from its cultural context. In order to understand art we have to understand its time and place, and when you look at the time and place that produced Lichtenstein’s art — popular culture in 1950s America — you see how
I’ve read several books about Roy Lichtenstein, and even saw a movie about him. I have to say that this blog post is the most in-depth story of the man and his work that I have ever seen. The author did an amazing job of researching and writing this article.
The description of the painting itself is fascinating, and I love the details about why this particular painting was such a success. The blog format works well for this kind of story, because it allows you to follow a chronological thread as different people react to the painting at different times.
Even if you aren’t an art person, the story is worth your time. It’s just really interesting.
How much would you pay for a picture? How about $200 million? Sounds like a lot, but in the world of art, prices like that are actually pretty cheap. That’s what the Jeff Koons sculpture “Popeye” sold for at auction in 2014 – and that was a bargain compared to some other recent works.
See how cheap it is to buy a painting? Just kidding. If you want to buy a Lichtenstein painting, you’re probably going to have to pay millions of dollars. But why? Is Lichtenstein really one of the best artists ever? Or is it just because he did something different – and it happened to become popular later on?
Trying to answer those questions will lead us on a journey through some of the most famous places in America. We’ll spend time with Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol and Edvard Munch, we’ll make stops at some of America’s most famous cities (New York, Chicago and San Francisco), and we’ll even go back in time to the 1920s to see where modern art began.