Lichtenstein

I just noticed Craig Yoe plugging (Jan 30) his recent Arf Museum book from July last. I picked it up at the San Diego Con and thoroughly enjoyed it. It's very much a grab bag of unrelated bits and pieces corresponding to the theme of 'The unholy marriage of art and comics'. This , the second issue consists of such delights as a dozen full page color pieces of the Yellow Kid by Outcault, made for a series of lightweight book collections of the kid that never materialized, pages by Art Young, victorian cartoonist Charles Bennett, a dozen pages, mostly in color, tracing the iconography of King Kong holding Faye Wray aloft back through a US World War 1 enlistment poster (Destroy the mad Brute!), via a Homer Davenport cartoon against 'Crokerism', to a sculpture by the French artist Emmanuel Fremiet. Now that's scholarship! And it's all done with an outrageous sense of fun.

He shows a photo of Roy Lichtenstein speaking at the National Cartoonists Society in 1964, as a follow up to the Mort Walker two pager in Arf which tells the anecdote of how Mort invited the painter along to ambush him about stealing the work of hard working comics guys. Something strikes me as bogus about this. I'm suspecting that Mort knows who the image was pinched from because it's been well analysed and discussed in the intervening years. Would Mort Walker have been familiar at the time with styles of assorted guys who were filling romance comic books, in the late '50s, completely anonymously. And could he have recognized a personal style after it had been restyled by Lichtenstein, unless he was familiar with the actual individual issues of the comic books in question. I remember Lew Schwartz telling me that he never told his colleagues in the Cartoonists Society that he was ghosting Batman for a number of years, presumably because it wasn't something to be boasted about. The only currency of value in the cartooning world in those days was a syndicated strip. Very few comic book artists signed their work, even when they were allowed to do so. So Walker's piece smacks of a retroactive re-evalauation.

Was Alex Beam at the Boston Globe, on oct 18 last, in Lichtenstein: creator or copycat?, also writing baloney just for effect or was he locked up in a dark room during his formative years:
"Color me naive, but I never thought Lichtenstein's work was a direct copy of scenes from comic books. I assumed that he stylized certain scenes suggested by the comic vernacular of the 1950s and 1960s. 'He tried to make it seem as though he was making major compositional changes in his work, but he wasn't,' says (David) Barsalou, who teaches at the High School of Commerce in Springfield. 'The critics are of one mind that he made major changes, but if you look at the work , he copied them almost verbatim. Only a few were original.'
'Barsalou is boring to us,' comments Jack Cowart, executive director of the Lichtenstein Foundation. He contests the notion that Lichtenstein was a mere copyist: 'Roy's work was a wonderment of the graphic formulae and the codification of sentiment that had been worked out by others. Barsalou's thesis notwithstanding, the panels were changed in scale, color, treatment, and in their implications. There is no exact copy'."

I've always presumed DC comics were pragmatic enough at the time, pleased that the images were coming mostly from their books. The artists had already sold all the rights, so I don't know why they would be whingeing, if indeed they were. No, the complaints all come from moral indignation of many years after the events. I have no time for it. To borrow a few lines from Charles Rosen, writer on classical music, "To strike a strong moral attitude toward an historical phase of art leads to ludicrous misunderstanding... and is pardonable only when we are dealing with contemporary phenomena; when we have a stake in the next choice that will be made, when our attitude is a hope or an anxiety, not self indulgence masking as principle."

David Barsalou, whose web site instigated the Globe piece, has amassed 85 pairings of Lichtenstein originals with their comic book panel 'sources'.
Showing them side by side like this is useful for an understanding of the iconographic connections, but it does miss the essence of the exercise, that is that Lichtenstein took a tiny picture, smaller than the palm of the hand, printed in four color inks on newsprint and blew it up to the conventional size at which 'art' is made and exhibited and finished it in paint on canvas. In theory it was like painting a view of a building, or a vase. He worked through a long series of the same kind of thing before applying the particular treatments he had devised, such as the mechanical dots, to other kinds of images, ultimately including abstract images as in the brushstroke series. I find his whole project quite astonishing and invigorating. It was good for art. Hell, it was even good for the comic book medium, setting a precedent for it to be taken seriously.
"Given the predominance of visual media, both postmodern art and postmodern culture gravitate towards visual forms, as in the "cartoons" of Roy Lichtenstein. A good example of this, and of the breakdown between "high" and "low" forms, is Art Spiegelman's Maus, a Pulitzer-prize-winning rendition of Vladek Spiegelman's experiences in the Holocaust, which Art (his son) chooses to present through the medium of comics or what is now commonly referred to as the "graphic novel."

Lichtenstein stands on the doorstep of postmodernism, within which philosophy the 'real' has slipped out of our grasp and pictures will thereafter be about pictures and stories about stories. Walker's story belongs among the tall tales of an older generation, when people still believed in the real, and in a kind of understood reality behind the joy of telling stories in a big way.
Lew Schwartz told me a great anecdote about the late Bill Mauldin, and he also told it to Jon Cooke and it appeared in his Comic book Artist magazine, because yarns were designed for a long life and a lot of use, like everything else, in those days. About how Bill was just back from the war in Europe, and it was young Lew's first time at the National Cartoonist Society, and Bill gave him a lift back to the Prince George Hotel where Lew was staying for the night, and he was completely drunk and tried to drive his jeep (which the army had let him keep, for his exceptional services), through the revolving doors of this grand old building. Apparently Bill had been drowning his sorrows all day because his wife had just told him she was leaving him for another guy, and he had been down to the publishers office that afternoon and ripped the dedication page out of two thousand copies of his new book.
It was great yarn, told slowly, and obviously Bill didn't literally destroy two thousand copies of his book. But one gets the meaning and enjoys the story-telling. A couple of years back Lew's contemporary Jerry Robinson started in on a long anecdote onstage at the Eisner awards at San Diego. I immediately cringed in horror, thinking 'oh no, Jerry, please don't. I love ya and I want to hear it, but that kind of thing just doesn't go down any more..." it was agonizing to see the audience become restless.

Anyway, one last irony ( I write it smiling at life's daftness, without a hint of indignation). The other voice in the above argument is the Lichtenstein Foundation. On the opening page of their site, an excellent document on the artist and his life, it says: "The contents of this site are for personal and/or educational use only. Neither text nor photographs may be reproduced in any form without the permission of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation."... and then you have to click the 'I agree' button.