+ Expand

Artist or Maker: Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997)

+ Expand

Provenance: Acquired from the artist by the present owner

+ Expand

Exhibited: New York, Leo Castelli Gallery, Roy Lichtenstein, September-October 1963.
Southhampton, Parrish Art Museum, Roy Lichtenstein Paintings, August-September 1982.
Bilbao, Sala Rekalde and The Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, The Tradition of the New, May-July 1995.
Columbus, Wexner Center for the Arts, Roy Lichtenstein, September 1995-January 1996.
Denmark, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art; London, Hayward Gallery; Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Roy Lichtenstein: All About Art, August 2003-February 2005, p. 48, no. 17 (illustrated in color).

+ Expand

Literature: D. Judd, "In the Galleries," Arts Magazine, November 1963.
M. Lobel, Image Duplicator: Roy Lichtenstein and the Emergence of Pop Art, New Haven and London 2002, p. 147 (illustrated in color).
E. Gedda, "Roy Lichtenstein," Konstvarlden & Disajn, n.p., no. 4, 2003, pp. 44-49 (illustrated in color on the cover).
M. Gibb, "Pop Art-Then & Now," Collections: International Art & Culture, London, vol. 9, no. 1, p. 35 (illustrated in color).

+ Expand

Notes: Property of Mitchell Lichtenstein

IN THE CAR by Robert Rosenblum
By now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the seniors among us remember that once upon a time we could count on what used to be called modern art to jolt us out of complacency with something we had never seen before, a visual outrage that seemed at once threatening and tonic. Like someone whose ears had been electrified by the first performance of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring in 1913, I can still treasure my memories of being totally unbalanced by the sight of art so new and so different that, at least at first glance, it would not compute, defying all expectations of what could be put on a rectangular canvas or a plinth. My first upsetting mixtures of bewilderment and rejuvenation belonged to an older generation than mine, namely, to the work of Rothko, Still, Newman; but by the mid-1950s, I was in synch with my own generation and could watch the non-stop action provided year after year at the legendary gallery of Leo Castelli, who reigned with cosmopolitan style over what felt like a private salon of hip young art-lovers. In my historical imagination, he revived the avant-garde ambiance of Stein's and Kahnweiler's pre-war Paris. Not across the ocean, but right here in New York, on the second floor of a brownstone at 4 East 77 Street, came one jaw-dropping challenge after another. Who had ever seen a tattered, paint-smeared bed placed upright against a wall? What could one make of a painting that looked like nothing but a handmade copy of a flattened American flag? Who had ever dreamed that a picture could be made of only black stripes arranged in numbing symmetry?
But even this succession of perplexing but tonic heresies hardly prepared me for what, in retrospect, might have been the greatest visual trauma of my gallery-going life, Roy Lichtenstein's three-week long debut at Castelli's, from February 10 to March 3, 1962. I was so startled by this full-scale offense to the decorum of domestically-scaled gallery walls that I might even have gasped out loud. Could I possibly be looking at a painting of an ad for the latest model in American washing machines or supermarket turkeys? And perhaps even more alarming, was I really seeing oil-on-canvas paintings of blown-up comic strip panels that celebrated the mechanized macho violence of a fighter plane bombed to oblivion or the soap-operatic moments of an all-American girl's bliss, whether her first kiss or the excitement promised in a thought balloon that, with a nervous stammer, read: "It'sit's not an engagement ring. Is it?" But even thinking away this crass assault on the timeless, universal imagery guarded within abstract art's ivory towers, as only the purist-minimalist Donald Judd seemed to be able to do in a review (Arts Magazine, April 1962), there was the simultaneous shock of a visual language that looked unspeakably crude, especially by contrast with the nuanced colors and handmade brushstrokes familiar to the Ab Ex world and even, one began to realize, to Johns's flags, which had at first looked like impersonal replicas but then began to look lovingly crafted. Espousing the low-budget techniques of lowly commercial artists, Lichtenstein's paintings hurt the eye with their insistence on only the three primary colors, a trio that, with Mondrian, had once evoked abstract essences, but that now proclaimed the shrill chromatic shorthand of comic books and mail-order catalogues. Then there were the black contours, again conjuring the rockbottom visual economy of commercial imagery, willfully insensitive lines that mocked highfalutin traditions of an artist's personal touch. And adding insult to injury, there were the Ben-Day dots which, mirroring their source in cheap, belt-line image reproduction, conveyed with mechanized perfection the textures, the lights and shadows that high-minded artists had slaved to achieve. And beyond this, there was the threat to old-fashioned ideas of originality. Weren't these paintings simply unedited copies of existing images? Could that be art?
I was dazzled by Lichtenstein's head-on attack on what used to be polarized as "form and content." He not only upset everybody by the gross images with which he chose to pollute art's sanctuaries, but by the equally gross visual vocabulary with which he depicted these commonplaces of American life. But very quickly, my training as an academic art historian gave me a handle on his seemingly unprecedented challenge to aesthetic propriety. As the dust settled, many examples popped up to supply a respectable genealogical table, among them, Courbet's proletariat subject matter; Seurat's regimented dots and primary hues; Beardsley's poster-flat, black-and-white graphics; Picasso's Cubist embrace of cafi signs and billboards. This, in turn, not only helped to make Lichtenstein's art look backwards as well as forwards, but helped to absorb the initial shock of what at first looked ugly, permitting us to look more carefully at how ugliness could become a new kind of beauty.
So it was that within a year, by the time of Lichtenstein's second show at Castelli's, from September 28 to October 24, 1963, things began to look very different. Now, one was no longer surprised to find such grass-roots images as the all-American icon of a baseball manager or the adolescent melodrama of a love-sick drowning girl who would "Rather sink than call Brad for help" together with its teenage-boy counterpart of a German submarine captain about to launch a torpedo. And slowly, Lichtenstein's unique genius became visible. Here was an artist who, working with what was always considered to be the crudest, anti-art imagery of cartoon narratives and cheap merchandising, created a complete visual universe of his own, a signature style that shouted his name. This, in fact, turned out to be the enduring wonder of his art. Like an alchemist, he had managed to transform base metals into gold. With astonishment, we began to realize that his works were, of all unexpected reversals, marvels of decorative elegance and complexity, like American translations of Japanese prints. Once more, Donald Judd's perception was precocious. In his review of this new show (Arts Magazine, November 1963), he again managed to screen out the offensive subject matter, focusing instead on a formalist reading that ended up praising several of the paintings as "broad and powerful."
In the Car was one of the works Judd admired a canvas that in retrospect pinpoints perfectly these vintage years. Born in 1923 and painting all through the 1950s, Lichtenstein was already in his late 30s when, as if suddenly caught in a collective surge of rebellion and innovation, he finally defined not only his own art, but became a charter member of that group of American Pop artists -- Warhol, Rosenquist, Oldenburg, among them -- who also emerged in the early 1960s. Its inscription, rfLichtenstein '63 for Mitchell, handwritten on the back of the canvas, gives this seemingly impersonal painting a personal touch, since it includes the artist's middle initial, F (for Fox), which he had used when he exhibited in the 1950s but then dropped, and is dedicated to his then seven-year-old son Mitchell (born 1956 and now a well-known actor), whose mother had left the artist early that year to begin a separate life with their two sons.
The painting, however, deals with a comic-strip drama, another couple with crossed swords whom we view through the window of a speeding car. The chill in the air is almost palpable. The driver, who, with his movie-star good looks, might once have been Mr. Right but is now Mr. Wrong, looks away from the windshield to cast an angry glance at the no less angry ice princess, who, armed by her leopard-skin collar and a helmet of flowing blond hair, looks straight ahead, avoiding his furtive gaze. What happened?
The comic-book source for Lichtenstein's painting, a panel from a September, 1961 issue of Girls' Romances, which sold for 10 cents, helps a bit to explain the young lady's emotional crisis. A caption floating over the car reads: "I vowed to myself I would NOT miss my appointmentthat I would NOT go riding with him..yet before I knew it"But unlike most of Lichtenstein's other vignettes from teen-age tales of love's ardors, the narrative text is deleted from the canvas, leaving us more room to imagine the cause of this emotional contretemps, perhaps a lovers squabble or the intrusion of an even more beautiful or handsome rival. In 1963, of course, this moment of high tension in the private lives of a well-heeled American couple from a generic suburb looked like an uncouth alien on a gallery wall, but now, in retrospect, Lichtenstein's sophisticated adaptation of a cartoon crisis belongs to his generation's growing attraction to the ironic delights of campy melodrama, best exemplified in the films of Douglas Sirk from the 1950s and defined in Susan Sontag's classic essay, "Notes on Camp," published in 1964. And today, in the twenty-first century, this tradition keeps expanding, witness Todd Haynes's film, Far from Heaven (2002) or the huge success of the TV serial, Desperate Housewives, whose characters, moving constantly from one stressful moment to another, bring up-to-date the knowing smirk sparked by Lichtenstein's caricatures of America's anxiety-ridden teen-age girls and women. Today, too, Lichtenstein's paintings of the 1960s have begun to provide grist for the mills of gender studies; for no other artist of his time had made so clear America's prejudices that boys were destined to become virile men, eager to destroy the enemy, and girls would end up as happy housewives, keeping their kitchens spick-and-span. In the Car pairs male and female perfection, distilled from the comic book source to an ideal clarity. The male driver has a young movie star's still unwrinkled face, marked by the firm, straight contours defining his jaw and adorned with a cleft chin that mirrors his furrowed brow. As for his girlfriend, who might be a stand-in for Grace Kelly or Tippi Hedren, her equally flawless face is all curves, from the flowing, Art Nouveau cascade of her abundant coiffure to the smaller echoes in her smoothly rounded chin, her pursed lips, her glowering cat-eyed stare (with just a dot of blue in the iris to confirm her Aryan blood), and the profile of her elegantly itsy-bitsy nose that displays the ideal results offered in the nose-job ad Andy Warhol made famous in his Before and After series of 1962. This binary coding of male and female looks and behavior is exactly matched by the comic-book sources Lichtenstein used in the 1960s. On the one hand, he plucked his ideas from the likes of Girls' Romances, Girls 'Love Stories, Secret Hearts; on the other, from All-American Men of War, Star-Spangled War Stories, Our Fighting Forces. Although an ardent feminist might accuse Lichtenstein of confirming sexist role models, the effect is exactly the opposite. In fact, he pushes these stereotypes to such an extreme of parody that they expose the subliminal ways in which Americans were brainwashed, from their comic-strip days onward, into accepting conventional male/female polarities. Without a programmatic social agenda, Lichtenstein, through his puckish humor, helped to promote awareness of the simple-minded assumptions that women are about desperate love affairs and washing machines and men are about fighter planes and baseball.
Today, Lichtenstein's initially outrageous cartoon imagery has become so familiar that it is easy to see, which was hardly the case in the 1960s, how totally he has transformed his populist sources. However fascinating In the Car may be as a cultural mirror of everything from the rejuvenating mix of high and low in the 1960s to the growing taste for camp, it is above all a sumptuously beautiful painting that extracts from the comic-book image both graphic punch and intricate detail reborn as a taut, immaculate network of jig-saw puzzle perfection. No matter where we look, there are major and minor feasts for the eye. We might begin by enjoying the virtuoso handling of the three primary colors, plus black and white, a Spartan palette used by both Mondrian and comic-strip artists. As always, Lichtenstein can coax amazing textural and chromatic variations out of these minimal staples of commercial printing. The yellows at the left, for example, begin with the blond purity of the young woman's hair, but then, thanks to a screen of red Ben-Day dots and black patches, turns into a leopard's spotted and fuzzy hide on what becomes, with its mix of red and yellow, an orange-toned ground. The unadulterated red of the driver's tie becomes, with Ben-Day dots on a white ground, an expanse of pink skin, which is then subtly intensified (the single red dots are paired) to become a pert lipsticked mouth. As for the blue, this again starts as a pure hue on the driver's jacket, but is then mixed with black to become a dark and shaggy head of masculine hair matching the leopard's patchy fur. Small details keep contributing to this maximal orchestration of minimal means. As in many paintings by Seurat (another artist who found inspiration in cheap color reproductions), there is a firm skeleton of straight versus curved lines. As for the curves, there are witty echoes of simplified arcs that join, for example, the young woman's one visible pearl earring to the rounded pattern on the other side of her head, which turns out to be the top of her companion's ear, a shape then amplified in the cropped view of the steering wheel at the lower right. As for the straight lines, the frames of the windows compress the angry couple on both sides, near and far, into a cage on wheels, while the horizontal and diagonal streaks on the panes convey both glassy reflections and, in a streamlined Futurist manner, a sense of mechanized speed captured as in a film still.
Lichtenstein's acute focus on altering even the most minor details in order to reach peaks of shipshape, inviolable perfection was clearly demonstrated by the fact that he made a second version of In the Car, roughly twice the size of the original, in which he reworked many passages of the first version. Apart from the major change of constricting the warring couple even more tightly by adding the frame of the car door at the bottom, there are many fascinating smaller changes that attest to his obsession with decorative rhyme. The streaks, for example, have totally changed their patterns and the lowest diagonal on the wind window at the lower right almost does double-service as a windshield-wiper. The sign for tiny wrinkles on these otherwise unblemished faces has also changed, so that both figures now have additional matching crow's feet under their eyes. And this, in turn, is reflected in the pattern of the leopard's spots, one of which, vastly enlarged, now sprouts the wrinkle pattern also used for human skin. Like any painter who does nuanced variations on the same theme, whether Monet or Rothko (both of whom Lichtenstein would soon resurrect in his own pictorial language), Lichtenstein can move from the impact of the whole image to the subtle adjustment of small details that, for those who look closely, differentiate one canvas from the other.
There are also, of course, more conspicuous differences between these two versions of In the Car. The smaller canvas is undoubtedly the first version, since it is much closer to the comic-strip source and marks the artist's initial response to translating a lowly image into his new visual language. Moreover, its size conveys a more intimate, domestic scale, appropriate to the artist's dedication to his young son, in whose possession the painting remained. The second version, twice the size of the first, has a public, billboard quality, more appropriate to the museum walls on which it now hangs at Edinburgh's National Gallery of Modern Art. But whether seen separately or together, either one of the two paintings, so similar and yet so different, offers a time capsule of an unforgettable moment in the career of a major artist and in the story of young Turks who become classics who become classics of art history.