Roy Lichtenstein: Like New

New York City’s big new Roy Lichtenstein show turns out to be “far more touching than I had anticipated,” said Jason Farago in The New York Times. Lichtenstein, who’s routinely celebrated as one of pop art’s visionaries, is usually credited with deflating high art by borrowing from comic books while reducing painting to components simple enough that a machine could reproduce them. In truth, the native New Yorker rendered each of the famous Ben-Day dots on his canvases “with something a lot like love,” a revelation that helps make the show “the most momentous exhibition of the season.” At a time when many of us are routinely deluged with AI-generated images, we see Lichtenstein (1923–97) modeling a constructive, decades-old response. With each dot painted by human hand and each choice he made in selecting from existing images and reworking them, he was insisting on the importance of a singular human vision, answering his own era’s flood of mass-market imagery by “keeping faith with a beauty that could last for all time.”

Lichtenstein wasn’t a lazy plagiarist, said David Smith in The Guardian. At the Whitney show, the artist’s sketchbooks and preliminary drawings show how often he altered the images of his source materials, “re-engineering line weights, cropping compositions, and shifting color fields to agitate the viewer’s eye.” The impact of his innovations was immediate, and the museum has re-created his breakthrough 1962 solo show at the Leo Castelli Gallery. His prescience was also such that by 1968, he was already speaking about his Ben-Day dots in relationship to new technologies that were translating visual imagery into transmittable data.

There’s no doubt that Lichtenstein is one of the winners of the American century, said Jerry Saltz in NYMag.com. He changed art forever, and “his style is one of the most recognizable in all of art history.” But while the Whitney show is “jazzy, bright,” and “packed to the rafters” with “paintings that jump off the walls,” its thesis falls flat. “The curators say every picture is an argument about seeing,” but Lichtenstein’s argument is the same every time, making “Like New” an illustration of “what happens when a revolutionary visual language becomes so familiar that the revolution disappears and leaves little to chew on.”

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Lichtenstein’s best works, all from 1962 to 1965, were “satirical commentaries on American consumerism, the good life, the heroic male, and standardized beauty,” said John Yau in Hyperallergic. Unfortunately, he exposed the limitations of his style as soon as he began using it to produce mock re-creations of works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne, and other past masters. “He went from being a satirist of America’s ideals of comfort and beauty to being a parody of himself.” If we’re being honest, he never recovered.