Roy Lichtenstein

New York City

Roy Lichtenstein’s early appropriation of the aesthetics of American popular culture made him integral to the development of Pop art. A student of the work of Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and Paul Klee, Lichtenstein incorporated elements of contemporary art theory and popular print media into his painting. In 1961 he began to replicate the Benday dot system used in mass-circulation printed sources such as comics, newspapers, and billboards; this would become a signature element of his painting and sculpture.

The exhibition Landscapes in the Chinese Style that only runs for a few more days at the Gagosian Gallery in New York City, showcases Lichtenstein’s fascination of landscape paintings. The monochromatic prints of Edgar Degas, featured in an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, New York in 1994, provided inspiration. He was struck by his predecessor’s ability to suggest the features of a landscape with just a few strategic swathes of gray, allowing a nebulous shape to stand in for exacting form. Captivated by traditional Chinese painting, in particular from the Song Dynasty (960–1279 AD), he considered how to craft the delicate, ethereal atmosphere so implicit to the Landscapes in the Chinese Style. Lichtenstein also visited exhibitions of East Asian Art in New York, Washington and Boston, and perused the exhibition catalogues—which may partly account for his emphasis on the secondary nature of the source imagery, deriving from reproductions of original works rather than from the works themselves.

Gagosian Gallery

March 1st – April 7th, 2012
555 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011
USA

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