Plagiarism.

When I wrote about Lichtenstein on Sunday I didn’t stop to think what a can of worms that subject is, silly me, and got the longest and most comments on a post so far, even allowing for me deleting two of my own responses to comments (after choosing words with impeccable care in a presentation piece, it’s always a sad spectacle to see a writer blundering around like a beached walrus among the pursuant snipes). In my article I carefully avoided expressing an opinion on the matter, confining myself to observing the foolishness of other parties. Since so many others have screamed PLAGIARISM! In the Lichtenstein matter I feel I now have to stick my foot in.

My school art teachers were probably of a very academic disposition. I wasn't aware enough of the big picture at the time to have a real insight into that. When I found myself at another school later my teacher there worked in an abstract mode but his theory was that painting would come back to figuration. He was a bit stuffy about the the areas where my head resided. By this time I had enthusiastically taught myself a great deal about the history of the subject, working through the phases of modernism, and when I finally arrived at Pop Art, which was making it into the commonplace handbook histories of art by the late sixties (after being celebrated in the colour magazines, which as a kid I hadn’t taken much notice of.)










So, seeing Lichtenstein’s huge ‘Whaam!’ at the Tate in 1970 (I’d only just arrived in London), seven years after it was painted, was a real revelation to me (I'd seen it in books of course, but this was the defining moment). Here we were back at figuration but it was a kick in the pants to my stuffy art teacher, and it kicked over the dividing screen between high art and low art, for in my head it didn't exist (which I guess just means I was paying attention to the zeitgeist unconsciously) and I had been looking for confirmation out there in the world at large. After that moment I had proof of my conviction that such a division was bogus.
Lichtenstein largely abandoned the lifting of comic book panels by about ’66, and his Mural with Blue Brushstroke, found hanging in the lobby of the AXA Center, New York City, painted in 1986, is a masterpiece, unless you’re one of those flat earth types I sometimes refer to here, in which case you will deny it. Our culture decrees that every clot is entitled to their opinion, and so you may do so.

But let’s stick to the issue; the lifted panels. It was necessary that they be as near as possible to the original for the point to work. Lichtenstein was putting a whole style on the wall, and it had to be impersonal and recognizable, with adjustments made not for style, but for succintness and clarity. Inevitably in this age of democratic culture, and Pop Art contributed to the dialogue that brought the change, the originators of the lifted images would have to get their due credit (they cannot be owed cash, since they owned no rights in the images), and that is now part of the story. And so it should be. However a lot of the argument that you'll find on Wikipedia looks cockeyed to me. The art world argues that Lichtenstein altered the compositions, which is irrelevant; my pal Gibbons is in there, defending the quality of the original comic books, which can only be a personal opinion; I challenge you to read the damn things all the way through. Everyone to his opinion regarding quality, but is it worth arguing about a quoted panel? Somebody says: “Some (of the comic book artists) threatened to sue him…” Wha? Where did that come from? Sue for what? The artists never owned the work, so they couldn’t be suing for damages. What for then? The theft of a ‘style’? Is there a legal precedent for that? Can any of these pictures be said to be appropriating a personal style anyway? They all look generic. And they are interesting for that very reason.

And that is the problem with art today: the artist believes he must find a style (or a schtick really) and defend it with his life. And if all the schticks are already taken, he must pull one out of his ass. He must find one, invent one, fabricate one, for he can be nothing if he cannot be original. It’s what I once saw termed ‘the neurosis of innovation’.

It’s time to turn to my favourite philosopher, R G Collingwood, once called ‘one of the (twentieth) century's best-known "neglected" thinkers.’ ‘He portrayed art as a necessary function of the human mind, and considered it collaborative, i.e., a collective and social activity.' I used a long and wonderful quote from his Speculum Mentis, or the map of Knowledge (1924) in my How to be an Artist, and I consider that quotation to be at the very heart of what my book is about. Collingwood wrote this other one in The Principles of Art (1938) and I obtained it via David A Pierce who transcribed it on his own site. Take it with a pinch of salt, pepper or whatever condiment you have to hand.

"To begin by developing a general point already made in the preceding chapter: we must get rid of the conception of artistic ownership. We try to secure a livelihood for our artists (and God knows they need it) by copyright laws protecting them against plagiarism; but the reason why our artists are in such a poor way is because of that very individualism which these laws enforce. If an artist may say nothing except what he has invented by his own sole efforts, it stands to reason he will be poor in ideas. If he could take what he wants wherever he could find it, as Euripides and Dante and Michelangelo and Shakespeare and Bach were free, his larder would always be full, and his cookery might be worth tasting.

This is a simple matter, and one in which artists can act for themselves without asking help (which I am afraid they would ask in vain) from lawyers and legislators. Let every artist make a vow, and here among artists I include all such as write or speak on scientific or learned subjects, never to prosecute or lend himself to a prosecution under the law of copyright. Let any artist who appeals to that law be cut by his friends, asked to resign from his clubs, and cold-shouldered by any society in which right-thinking artists have influence. It would not be many years before the law was a dead letter, and the strangle-hold of artistic individualism in this one respect a thing of the past.

This, however, will not be enough unless the freedom so won is used. Let all such artists as understand one another, therefore, plagiarize each other's work like men. Let each borrow his friends' best ideas, and try to improve on them. If A thinks himself a better poet than B, let him stop hinting it in the pages of an essay; let him re-write B's poems and publish his own improved version. If X is dissatisfied with Y's this-year Academy picture, let him paint one caricaturing it; not a sketch in Punch, but a full-sized picture for next year's Academy. I will not rely upon the hanging committee's sense of humour to the extent of guaranteeing that they would exhibit it; but if they did, we should get brighter Academy exhibitions. Or if he cannot improve on his friends' ideas, at least let him borrow them; it will do him good to try fitting them into works of his own, and it will be an advertisement for the creditor. An absurd suggestion? Well, I am only proposing that modern artists should treat each other as Greek dramatists or Renaissance painters or Elizabethan poets did. If any one thinks that the law of copyright has fostered better art than those barbarous times could produce, I will not try to convert them."

* * * *

Cartoonist in court over drink-flying charges. (nobody from this parish). (I edited to add that in so i can say I beat Tom Spurgeon to it.)

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.