Image Duplicator: Roy Lichtenstein and the Emergence of Pop Art [Anglais] [Relié]

Among the many retrospective texts written in the years following Lichtenstein's death in 1997, this offers an unprecedented and cogent reappraisal of the artist's participation in the pop art movement between the late 1950s and mid-1960s. It also provides valuable insight into the nature of the union between psychology and commerce in both the marketplace and the pop aesthetic of this period. Lobel (art history, Bard Coll.) presents Lichtenstein as a shrewd if occasionally ironic manipulator of lowbrow cultural ephemera who struggled with the paradox of being a painter in the age of mechanical reproduction and who, consequently, transformed elements of mass culture into sly, sometimes self-effacing intellectual puns. Lobel's argument is well crafted and concise, and over the course of five chapters, he entices the reader down several conceptual tributaries branching from his central thesis. He tips his hat to postmodern art historical orthodoxy by employing methodologies and broaching issues now considered de rigueur for art theorists: semiotics, gender issues, and the gaze. Lobel is sparing but effective in his use of illustrations, offering period advertisements, comics strips, and comparisons to works of a similar spirit by his sometime rival Warhol to distinguish Lichtenstein's oeuvre from others' in his milieu. Highly recommended for collections focusing on modern art. Savannah Schroll, Smithsonian Institution Libs., Washington, DC
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[N]avigates the demands of academic inquiry with intelligence and grace, integrating critical speculation, extended formal analysis, and meticulous scholarly research.

Roy Lichtenstein's distinctive paintings of the early 1960s are synonymous with the Pop art movement. These bold, oversized images inspired by newspaper advertisements and comic book scenes have been taken as reflecting the artist's fascination with the links between art and popular culture. In this highly readable and original book, Michael Lobel challenges this circumscribed view of Lichtenstein's work, offering a set of compelling new interpretations that reveal the artist's confrontation with a far wider range of issues. Lichtenstein's art is fundamentally engaged with a set of concerns central to art making in the postwar period: the relation between vision and technology, the possibility of articulating artistic identity, and the effect of mechanical reproduction on the work of art. Lichtenstein's project, Lobel argues, is structured by the tension between painting understood as a fully expressive, humanistic gesture and, conversely, as the product of a purely mechanical act. This handsomely illustrated book makes available for the first time an array of archival materials about Lichtenstein and his work, including photographs of the artist and many newly discovered sources for his imagery in the comics and advertisements of the early 1960s. It also provides new information on the context of the artist's Pop paintings in relation to contemporary developments in advertising culture, mechanical reproduction, and visual technologies. Examining the artist's work from fresh perspectives, the author not only offers a comprehensive analysis of Lichtenstein's early Pop paintings but also provides new insight into the issues that shaped the Pop art movement, artistic practices in the 1960s, and the historical relation between modern art and popular culture.

Yale Publications in the History of Art

"A timely, engaging, and even provocative study of this important artist, one that will serve equally well as an introduction for novices and as an investigation for specialists."—Ann Gibson, University of Delaware "The subtlety and sophistication of the best Pop art have always been underestimated. With new, solid research and fresh critical insight, Michael Lobel brings to light, for the first time, the acute aesthetic intelligence at work in the paintings of Roy Lichtenstein. He has written an essential work for any understanding of American art of the 1960s."—Thomas Crow, director, Getty Research Institute

Michael Lobel is assistant professor of art history at Bard College.