Page 38 - Studio International - January 1968

`I want my painting to look as if it had been pro-
Top, Diana 1965
pencil on paper
30 x 22 in. Coll: Mr and Mrs Leo Castelli, New York
Blonde 1 1965 15 in. high
Coll: Mr and Mrs Roger Davidson, Toronto
grammed. I want to hide the record of my hand'.4
Lichtenstein achieves this either by the anonymity of his
subject, as in Golf ball, or by a screen of quotation. When
his comic strip paintings were first seen, the general re-
action was to stress the connection between painting and
source at the expense of everything else. (This was partly
due to the unfamiliarity of comic strips to an art audience.)
Hence, Lichtenstein was granted temporary anonymity
behind his source. When asked in 1963 if Pop Art trans-
formed its models or left them raw, Lichtenstein said :
`Transformation is a strange word to use. It implies that
art transforms. It doesn't, it just plain forms'.5 This
appeared in his first public statement and has, as a
result, been over-stressed. A more accurate statement of
his position is contained in this quotation, of the following
year: 'In my own work there is a question about how
much has been transformed. You will discover the sub-
jects really are if you study them, but there is always the
assumption that they are the same, only bigger'.6 Once
transformation was admitted Lichtenstein may have
feared that his detachment, his personal form of anony-
mity, would be reduced. In fact, once the process of
transfer, and the inevitable transformation of the ori-
ginals is in the open, it is clear that Lichtenstein is not
consigning raw material directly to an art context, but
that he is making a double image in which his art and
other art or other channels are inextricable. It is this
ambiguity that permits him to simultaneously keep and
change a legible yet altered source.
Lichtenstein's comic strip and object paintings, since
1961, have depended on an even, unaccented contour; a
reduction and intensification of colour to a few points of
the spectrum (simulating the inks used in printing) ; and,
of course, the half-tone screens used in photo-engraving.
The dots, stencilled through screens (and often finished
by hand), at first lay in rather tentative, undulent sur-
faces, but by 1963 the dots were clearer and more com-
pletely controlled, though the impact of the first screened
colour-areas was great, like a giant step in the mechaniza-
tion of art. In Drowning girl, 1963, it is very clear that
the controlled colour intensity and the even line (which
Lichtenstein has compared, in this case, to waves by
Hokusai) constitute the artist's personal style and are not
impersonal at all. Forming his style when he did, in
succession to Abstract Expressionism, pre-planning and
reticence, which are both typical of Lichtenstein, seemed
evidence of a peak of impersonality. It is more accurate,
however, to speak of a simulated impersonality, of, in the
artist's words, 'mock insensitivity'.? His desire to handle
extra-art subjects within the forms of art is constant,
from the early images of girls (rather primitive popular
culture) to the later ones, such as Drowning girl (rather
sophisticated in type and more subtly drawn, both by
Lichtenstein and by the original artists).
The difference between Abstract Expressionism and
early Pop Art is often represented as the difference
between a process-art and an end-state art. The open
surface, the tracks of the hand, the drama of revisions,
the doubts about completion, are equated with de Koon-
ing and Kline and a tidy, clean-skinned look is identified
with Pop Art. However, this is only a partial description