Whaam! Roy Lichtenstein at Tate Modern

This weekend, London is bracing itself

for a full-on, eye-popping retina blast of an exhibition.

More than 120 works worth a combined £1.12 billion

have travelled the world, clocking up round trips of 8,000 miles apiece

in order to be here, at Tate Modern,

for one of the most anticipated shows of the year.

I'm going to give you an exclusive tour of the exhibition that brings

together the life's work of one of the superstars of 20th-century art.

A man who, in my view, is one of

the most significant and influential artists of his generation.

He's known as the connoisseur of the comic strip,

a master of irony, a prophet of popular culture,

pop art's king of cool,

Roy Lichtenstein.

When people think of Lichtenstein,

they are thinking of the works in this room.

Paintings that he created in the early '60s based on comic books.

These are the cartoon works.

You've got crying girls, you've got images of warfare,

and of course, all of them characterised

by Lichtenstein's really distinctive style.

Very few colours - red, yellow,

blue and thick, bold black outlines,

and of course, all of these dots -

the famous Lichtenstein dot.

And many of them are very funny.

"Why, Brad darling, this painting is a masterpiece!

"My, soon you'll have all of New York clamouring for your work!"

Of course, the irony was here, it was done in '62.

Very soon, Lichtenstein DID have New York clamouring for his work.

He sort of became Brad.

As well as all of these iconic, familiar pieces,

there's so much more.

We're going to get a sense of a very different style of Lichtenstein.

We'll see how throughout his career, that unmistakable Lichtenstein look

was applied to so many different subjects,

from sculptures to nudes.

Here's a homage to Picasso, Monet.

There's a Cubist still life.

Tonight, we'll also discover how he created his signature style.

We'll meet those close to him...

I knew Roy better than he knew himself.

..reveal how '60s America shaped his work...

..explore the controversy his use of comic book images provoked...

I find something slightly dishonest about it.

It seems to be doing a disservice to comic art.

..and examine his influence on other artists.

It is one of his greatest paintings, I think.

I remember the first time I saw it, it took my breath away.

And we'll ask, was Lichtenstein a pop art genius

or perhaps a one-trick wonder

who had a big idea that was so powerful he could never let it go?

Most people know Lichtenstein for his oversized cartoon paintings

like his sobbing blondes and Whaam!

He's often called the architect of pop art

and we still see his images everywhere,

in adverts for skin care products or sportswear,

or even on Valentine cards in gift shops.

We know when designers are doing a Lichtenstein.

His style is so bold, so widely reproduced,

it's immediately recognisable.

You could say that he's Lichtenstein-ised the world,

but of course, he didn't arrived fully formed.

Born in Manhattan in 1923,

Roy Fox Lichtenstein grew up on the Upper West Side of New York,

a shy but quietly determined character.

He fought in the Second World War,

but as a soldier

rather than flying planes, like the jet pilot heroes he'd later portray.

His first marriage, producing two sons,

was as emotionally volatile as the teen romance comic books

he'd later draw upon.

It ended in tears.

Roy spent his late 20s and most of his 30s as a jobbing art teacher,

churning out somewhat iffy paintings...

..with no definite style to call his own.

The art of the day was abstract expressionism,

an angst-ridden, macho style ruled by the masters of gloom,

Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning,

who laid their tortured souls - sploshily - onto canvas...

..with searing emotional intensity.

Roy gave it a go,

but his attempts were a little half-hearted in comparison.

The violence of feeling required

didn't come easily to this mild-mannered man.

So Lichtenstein spent the 1950s

toying with the bedevilling question of what - and how - to paint.

Looking at his early abstract expressionist works,

it's hard to see the makings of a genius.

One of the points of the exhibition

is to demonstrate the fact that,

you know, here was someone

who was really thrashing about

in his 20s and 30s, actually,

trying to work out how to define a style for himself

within an extraordinary period, actually, late '50s, early '60s,

you know, post-Second World War, lot going on at that time,

and these great abstract expressionist figures

like de Kooning and Pollock sort of

having an overbearing presence within the New York milieu, particularly.

These early ones, they are so radically different.

They stylistically belong to a whole different language,

visual language, don't they?

And that transformation seems so abrupt.

When you think of all those famous cartoon images of the '60s,

these feel like they were done by somebody completely...

-a different artist altogether.

-The idea of showing these

is to show exactly how volcanic, in a way, that change was.

Lichtenstein's breakthrough moment

came about largely thanks to a cartoon mouse.

It's the 1960s.

Lichtenstein is pushing 40 and yet to make it.

One day, the story goes,

his young son challenges him to draw

something as good as a cartoon.

Lichtenstein had dabbled with cartoon characters before,

but only in a sketchy, expressionistic way.

And then, in 1961, he came up with an extraordinary idea.

He decided to paint cartoon characters simply as they appeared.

I got the idea of trying, of doing one fairly straight.

I did it as a kind of idea, you know, "Let's just try this."

As I was painting this painting,

I kind of got interested in organising it as a painting, really,

which I really hadn't intended to do to begin with.

With his curious oil painting

of an oversized Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse,

Roy was onto something.

There was no denying it.

I put it up in my studio

and I couldn't do any other kind of painting.

Everything I did just looked like mush or something.

It was just that this thing kept, you know, looking at me.

Over time, the story of Look Mickey's origins has been retold.

Lichtenstein later claimed that he was inspired by a bubblegum wrapper.

In fact, the painting's source

was a page from a Walt Disney comic from 1960.

Whatever the truth of its origins, though,

Look Mickey fired the starting gun on a seriously successful career.

Well, Gavin, this is it, this is Look Mickey.

'To discuss Lichtenstein's breakthrough work,

'I'm joined by artist Gavin Turk,'

whose own work also draws heavily upon popular culture.

The picture has all these kind of qualities that then we see later on,

like the half-tone Ben-Day dot

and all these flat areas of single colour,

strong, bold outlines.

And of course the speech bubble with text in it.

It looks mechanical, but it is hand-painted.

-Totally hand-painted.

-This points the way because, when you look up close,

and it's nice seeing that it is not a reproduction but the real thing,

you can see a lot of preparatory drawing marks which have been left.

Those are things he needed to get rid of to create that

impersonal pop blank look.

He is literally removing himself from the frame.

He does sign this one but, later on, the signature disappears.

It's a good theory about that, which is that Donald Duck is

a surrogate for Roy Lichtenstein.

He has hooked the big one of a new pop art style.

You can see because he is looking at his reflection.

-Who's Mickey Mouse?

-Here's the abstract expressionists.

-Oh, I see.

-Can't you tell?!

How important has Lichtenstein been for you as an artist?

I think the thing with his work is to get involved with

appropriation was relatively new and novel.

I think that now and certainly towards the end of the '80s, it is commonplace.

It is part of the way that artists work.

For me, I think the most interesting element of this show, this body

of work, is how much he has been able to remove himself from the art.

Yet, when you see the work collectively, you feel him, somehow.

That's the great Lichtenstein paradox.

That's why he's very good.

It may have looked like a provocative joke, but Look Mickey was in part

a broadside against the earnest excesses

of abstract impressionism.

Lichtenstein wasn't the only artist stirring things up.

A radical new art movement was emerging in the late '50s and early '60s.

Good evening. The world of pop art.

The world of film stars, the twist, science fiction.

A world which you can dismiss if you feel so inclined, of course,

as being tawdry and second-rate, but a world, all the same,

in which everybody, to some degree, lives whether we like it or not.

Pop art emerged in the mid-'50s,

during America's postwar economic boom.

I think we're living in a society that, to a large extent, is pop.

A brazen new art, it shrugged off the tragic burden of the human condition...

and gorged, instead, in a mass-produced world filling the

billboards and TV screens of a new wide-eyed generation of consumers.

It's dealing with the images that have

come about in the commercial world

and is using that because there are certain things which are impressive or bold.

It's that quality of the images that I'm interested in.

The rules of what art can be made out of

had been jettisoned.

Artists broke free from the inhibiting

influence of abstract expressionism by taking what one artist called

"the everyday crap of their lives" and sticking it up on the gallery walls.

The British had started it. Richard Hamilton's consumerist satires.

Peter Blake's homespun paintings.

But the Americans made it bigger and more daring.

It was Jasper Johns's grubby painted flag.

Robert Rauschenberg's even grubbier duvet.

Lichtenstein declared pop art's victory in paint was his version of Popeye.

The bearded villain Bluto stands,

or falls, for abstract expressionism

and he's taking a right old smack

to the chops from the pumped-up sailor whose name begins with "pop".

I think it's quite easy to forget today just how shocking these

early pop paintings were.

There was an art critic Max Kozloff

who reviewed Lichtenstein's first solo show in 1962 and he said,

"Art galleries are being invaded by the contemptible and

"pin-headed style of gum-chewers, bobby-soxers and, worse, delinquents."

Just look what delinquents like Lichtenstein were assaulting galleries with.

I love the works in this room.

To me, they are quite stark and monochromatic,

but they are not particularly what Lichtenstein's popularly known for.

Why are you particularly drawn to these earlier black-and-white works?

I think I like them because they are so reduced.

They are not overtly comic book,

but they are very mundane objects. He has amplified them.

He has hand-painted them and I think

they are bordering on abstraction and I love them for that.

In this one, it's fantastic

because he's really critiquing his own technique.

He is using the magnifying glass to amplify these dots.

You can see that they're hand-painted.

You can see the glisten of the paint

and you realise that it's not a mechanical process.

Why is he revealing that? He starts using the Ben-Day dot.

This is from '63 and it's known as being...

He's trying to imitate mechanically reproduced imagery.

Yet, here, he is revealing that he does it with his own hand.

The little dot is being hand wrought and I think...

He's pointing to that in a very humorous way.

Compositionally, it's fantastic as well.

The fact that these things are black and white so they look

like they've been pulled from black-and-white publications.

Like the ball of twine over here.

This has been culled from some trade catalogue. It's been blown up

to some grand scale. It's so mundane.

I love the dots and the stripes.

It's this idea of reducing it to an abstraction.

How much have you looked to Lichtenstein for inspiration in your own work?

Perhaps a sidewards glance. He hasn't been a direct influence.

What about Explosions?

Well, of course, perhaps he did influence me in that respect.

He distilled out the explosion as an iconic image.

Perhaps one of the first people to do that.

I was certainly looking to that when I did my real explosion.

I was thinking of this idea of an explosion and its iconography

and how it has been so ubiquitous throughout centuries.

Somehow, he crystallised it, he took it from a cartoon

and made it into 3-D objects.

The dots have become holes and they cast their own shadows.

I love this idea of making an explosion into a physical object.

Do you see Lichtenstein's impact on art in the second half of the 20th century?

I think what he's taken somehow is the black line

because he's amplified that and made that into a large thing.

Now that black line is everywhere. Gilbert & George.

-There's all kinds of people using the black line.

-That's fascinating.

You think that artists look at his work and go,

he's using this black line in a way that no-one did before.

-I can use that myself.

-I think it's infused throughout contemporary art.

Lichtenstein was captivated by the raucous

culture of America's sell, sell, sell society.

Eventually, his paintings of disposable,

everyday advertisements would in turn influenced the sharp-suited

ad executives of Madison Avenue.

In the '60s, Americans went big on cigarettes, alcohol and sex

and an industry sprang into action to sell the more of it -

advertising.

Roy would have made a good ad man.

He instinctively understood how images could be used to sell us things.

It's made, in a way, partially, a new landscape for us in the way

of billboards, neon signs.

This is the landscape that I'm interested in portraying.

He was fascinated by the tactics of the industry.

The secrets laid bare by charismatic ad man

Don Draper on the hit TV show Mad Men.

What you call "love" was invented by guys like me to sell nylons.

Is that right?

Lichtenstein got the power and efficiency of branding.

He used to loiter in supermarket aisles to study packaging.

And he created a series of paintings based on adverts.

But his were simplified.

He used to isolate his objects against expanses of dots

or just empty backgrounds.

And in doing so, of course, he created his own brand -

Roy Lichtenstein.

But it's been a two-way street.

The advertising industry has pilfered

the Lichtenstein brand in return.

Inadvertently, he's helped to sell us everything

from washing-up liquid to acne cream.

I'm fascinated by the way that Lichtenstein,

who drew so extensively on pop culture in the '60s,

is now fully reintegrated into popular culture today.

With me to discuss that, I've got the critic Paul Morley

and former ad man Roger Mavity. Roger, can we start with you?

Do you see Lichtenstein's impact writ large upon advertising now?

I see a massive amount of advertising

which rips off the Lichtenstein look and feel.

I see none of it which is remotely memorable.

There's almost this sort of hall of mirrors effect going on,

whereby he was imitating advertising of his own era

and ad men who are not inspired now are imitating him.

There's a kind of nostalgic effect going on, don't you think?

I think pop culture and advertisers

have responded to the surface element of it

and the way of achieving a very abrupt image,

a strong image, very easily, if you like.

He was doing something that was a lot more troubling and profound

than merely surface.

I'm fascinated by the way he's been reincorporated into popular culture now so that...

He's cannibalised popular culture.

-I agree.

-It's gone into the realm of fine art,

-and then it's come back into pop culture.

-He's made...

taken low art and made high art out of it

and ad men have taken high art and made low art out of it,

so it's a kind of creative recycling.

Was it a glory time for advertising, though, in the early '60s?

Is part of the success of these paintings because the ads

they were based on were somehow intrinsically very powerful?

I think it goes deeper than just the advertising.

At a time when the American economy was exploding after the war,

advertising was incredibly powerful in driving that.

It was a culture which was becoming... preoccupied with consumption.

You know, Mad Men satirised that set of values and so does Lichtenstein.

If you look at the banality of the pedal bin, for example,

the fact that it is very banal is clearly an important part

of why the image works.

Lichtenstein was telling us that,

in a way, pop culture actually understands and defines

and describes the society it operates in better than art.

In a funny sort of way, he was advertising himself as well.

-He was creating his own brand.

-That's the key point.

The brand he's creating here is not the brand of the bin,

or whatever that newspaper ad was for this spray can, or for the ring, it's himself.

And that's the great triumph of Lichtenstein.

He's finding, in all this kind of throwaway cliched culture, his own originality.

-And a weird love of painting as well, oddly enough.

-Yeah.

It's about how you look at things.

But I think he is also personally very beguiled

by the way the mass media were looking at things

and the crudeness of reproduction where you can actually see the dots,

to him, is not a limitation at all, it's actually part of the charm of it

and he's deliberately exaggerated that.

So he is rather in love with the banal and almost fetishising it.

Of course, Lichtenstein wasn't the only one experimenting

with cartoons and commercial imagery in the early '60s.

His new pop paintings came as a nasty surprise to another artist

working in the same town at the same time.

There was a real buzz around pop art in New York in the early '60s.

-And

-the

-dealer that every artist wanted to court was Leo Castelli.

Lichtenstein had taken his work to Castelli's right-hand man Ivan Karp.

I said, I remember, something like,

"I'm not sure you're allowed to do things like this."

Guided by the perverse principle that if you hated it,

it was probably great,

Castelli had a hunch that this unacceptable art

was worth holding on to.

One day, a little-known commercial illustrator visited the gallery

and was horrified when he saw Lichtenstein's cartoon paintings.

An artist and a friend of his came in and I took out the painting

of the beach ball girl of Roy's and showed it to them

and they were enthralled. One of them, who had a mop of grey hair

and a very mottled complexion, said to me,

"I'm doing work very, very much like this!

"Would you come to my studio and look at it?"

It was a man named Andy Warhol.

Unbeknownst to each other, Warhol and Lichtenstein

had both been painting cartoons at exactly the same time.

But Castelli chose Lichtenstein.

Warhol feared that without Castelli's patronage,

he'd look like a follower.

He turned his back on Superman and took up soup cans instead.

So glamorous.

Take one.

So having claimed the territory for his own,

Lichtenstein got going on his famous cartoon paintings,

filled with soppy scenes of teen romance and the melodrama of war.

In all of these paintings, he was inspired by comic books

and he shows submariners or pilots or soldiers quite grim-faced,

quite stern, in the height of combat. Here, he's thinking,

he's concentrating hard on his sights and saying...

It's all quite tongue-in-cheek.

And you can see the big sound effect at the bottom.

It's almost as though, in paintings like this,

he's kind of satirising gender stereotypes

that you'd find in the media, as though, in mid-20th century America,

it was as if this was how you had to be a man.

But, of course, he's sending it up. It's tongue-in-cheek.

At the same time, he was working on another series

called the romance paintings, also based on comic books,

this time, comics that were appealing to adolescent girls.

They're about romance, they're about love,

about women trying to find a man and bag him so they could get married.

But there were a lot of obstacles in the way.

And the characters in Lichtenstein's paintings are the antithesis

of all of those soldiers in the war paintings,

because, here, they're very passive.

They hesitate a lot, they mumble, they stumble,

they sometimes leave these long pauses on the phone,

they look a little bit pathetic, even if they're quite beautiful.

But the similarity between them is that in both cases

you have this hot subject matter -

the frenzy of warfare...

..the passion and emotional volatility of puppy love,

but a very cool and detached,

almost ironic way in which those themes are painted.

People often think that Lichtenstein himself seems to be apart

from these paintings, almost invisible.

But I wonder whether that's right.

I suspect if we knew more about Lichtenstein the man,

we might be able to see the stamp of his personality

on paintings like these.

Dorothy Lichtenstein was married to Roy for nearly 30 years.

She's made a special trip over from New York for the exhibition.

I'm really, really thrilled to meet you

because I think it's safe to say that you knew Roy Lichtenstein better than anyone.

I knew Roy better than he knew himself.

Ah, excellent, well, then, you are the person to talk to, for sure.

-When did you first meet?

-I met Roy in 1964.

I was running an art gallery.

We did an exhibition called The Great American Supermarket

and so we asked Andy Warhol and Roy

if they would put an image on a shopping bag for us

instead of doing a poster, and they both agreed,

and I met Roy when he came in to sign the shopping bags.

I'd love to get a sense from you...

I mean, we're looking here

at these tremendously famous pictures he created

and I'd love to get a sense of the man behind these images.

I've read that he could be quite reserved and shy.

-Is that...?

-Well, he was reserved,

and a bit shy. Except when it came to his paintings, I guess.

These images of romance and war in comic books,

it is what Americans of a certain generation grew up with.

-They were iconic. Roy did not read comic books as a child.

-Didn't he?

No, he was the generation before comic books...

became so ubiquitous.

Very often, people say these are quite cool

and detached paintings with a level of irony.

Do you think maybe you can read them in terms of his life,

your life together? Are you sometimes the blonde that appears?

-I know that people have tried to say that.

-I hope so.

Roy really loved women. He was more comfortable with women.

He had more women friends than he had close male friends,

although he had a couple of really close male friends,

so I think he was in awe of women,

and of course he was in World War II,

he was drafted towards the end of the war, and was in Germany,

and so this idea of a war hero, a beautiful woman in love,

isn't it every heterosexual's fantasy?

Yes, but it kind of came true in his case, some people say.

There is the painting behind you, Masterpiece, in which it is

a wish-fulfilment painting in a way, but it did become true,

he did become the successful artist who married the glamorous blonde.

Well, he did, and even about that he kept a sense of irony.

He used to say, "Soon, somebody is going to be shaking me

"and saying, 'It's time for your pills.' "

-The whole thing a dream.

-Exactly.

Thinking about him as the man behind the painting,

often he is referencing great 20th-century art history,

Mondrian, Picasso, did he himself put himself in the same category?

Well, not publicly. Let's put it that way.

But I think he did, and actually I think every artist...

no artist thinks of themselves as second-tier, they always think

they will be discovered, even if it is after death.

But I think he did,

and I think he was kind of matching his talents with theirs.

What do you feel is Lichtenstein's legacy?

Well, I think he was one of the artists that really opened

the idea of art for generations to follow.

To do a cartoon, even Roy said when he did the first cartoon painting,

he had to get beyond the level of his own taste,

but also that he could not go back.

I mean, once he had done that,

there was no way you could go back and do what he had been doing.

I think people began to think if you can paint something that

looks like it came out of a comic book, what can't you do?

People often get fixated by the noisy attention-grabbing

subject matter of Lichtenstein's paintings.

In fact, it is quite easy to overlook the quiet,

meticulous craftsmanship that went into making them.

From the moment Lichtenstein ditched the histrionics of abstract expressionism,

his marks became deliberately impersonal, cold and flat.

"I want to hide the record of my hand," he said,

"and make my painting look as if it has been programmed."

Which is why he imitated the so-called Ben-Day dot,

a commercial printing method for producing shade and depth.

I was interested in dots because they had no sensitivity.

It is just, this is red, 50% red.

It is like some sort of mathematical problem.

In order to make his paintings deliberately mechanical

and un-painterly, he used a stencil to apply the dots.

He had already devised an ingenious rotating easel, allowing him

to spin canvases to concentrate on composition without letting

the subject matter get in the way.

With characteristic Lichtenstein irony,

his machine-like results are actually handmade.

Lichtenstein always said he wants to hide

the record of his hand, but what is great about seeing his paintings

up close is it is a reminder of how hand-painted they actually are.

You can see where he's painted the black outline as the final part of the painting.

You sense suddenly the way that the words are almost irrelevant,

they are just formal components of the picture, this white

and black balancing the white and black down here.

One of the most distinctive things about it is the use of all these dots.

This woman looks like she has a particularly virulent skin complaint.

This rash right over her face,

it has a very particular pictorial effect.

It really flattens the image,

emphasising the surface of the painting.

It is deliberately absurd because, of course,

there was something absurd about Lichtenstein taking a small

panel from a comic strip and blowing it up into a painting this gigantic.

I go through comic books looking for material which seems to hold

possibilities for paintings with both a visual impact

and in the impact of the written message.

Strictly for research,

Roy Lichtenstein pored over plenty of sappy romance weeklies

and exciting adventure comics with titles like Secret Hearts

and All-American Men Of War.

I try to look for something that says something mysterious or absurd.

He used to cut out panels that caught his eye from these

12-cents-a-pop publications, blow them up, and create huge paintings

that would one day fetch tens of millions of dollars.

Guess which is Roy's.

So, how should we judge them?

As homage to the unsung talents of comic art?

Why did you ask that? What do you know about my image duplicator?

Or plain old plagiarism?

I know that my work has been accused of looking like the things that

I copy, and it certainly does look like the things that I copy.

I believe I'm transforming this into something else,

or at least that I'm forming art.

There is no way to prove this.

One man with strong views on Lichtenstein's habit

of borrowing comic book imagery is Dave Gibbons,

the artist behind the acclaimed graphic novel Watchmen.

I really want to find out from you, Dave, what you think about this

idea that Lichtenstein was accused of being a plagiarist.

There was a famous article that came out

and I think the headline was "pop artists or copycats?"

I would say copycat.

In music, for instance, you can't just whistle somebody else's tune

or perform somebody else's tune, no matter how badly,

without somehow crediting or giving payment to the original artist.

Just to say, "This is Whaam! by Roy Lichtenstein after Irv Novick."

Why don't we look at some of Irv Novick's art? Because I managed to pick this up.

This is one of the All-American Men Of War comic books.

-Someone on the team picked this up for £5.95.

-Bargain.

-It is a bargain.

This painting, if it ever came on the market, would be going for tens of millions of pounds.

This is the source.

I would say to you, Dave, that he has not only transformed it,

he seriously improved it.

-I would disagree.

-Yes, I thought you might.

I mean this, to me, looks flat. It's flat and abstracted,

to the point that to my eyes, it's confusing,

whereas the original has got a three-dimensional quality to it.

It's got a spontaneity to it.

It's got an excitement to it and a way of involving the viewer that this one lacks.

For instance, the explosion here to me just looks like a collection of flat shapes,

whereas the explosion in the original, because there are no lines in there, because it's all

left to colour, seems to have, to me, much more the quality of an explosion.

I think the explosion in the original looks a bit weak and weaselly and measly

and not particularly effective. From me, this, as a painting,

not considered as a piece of comic book art, but as a piece of art, is far more successful than if this had

been reproduced and placed on a wall, for a number of reasons.

He's got rid of extraneous details like the planes on either side. He's removed the mountain,

which I think is an unfortunate compositional device.

He's made the balance of the explosion on the right

and the plane much clearer. It is much more balanced. They're more equal.

I think those are several compelling reasons why formally,

this is a much more successful image than the source.

Well, I think there's a fundamental error in what you're saying,

which is that, in fact, a comic book is not anything to do with a single image.

It's to do with a series of images and it's

the images in juxtaposition to one another which give them their power.

This is like a quotation.

-This is like three notes out of the middle of a symphony.

-Of course. OK, fine.

I agree with that. But this, we have to think of as a painting.

Does it work as a piece of art in its own right, as a painting?

If it simply imitated this panel here, I'm suggesting,

I think that it wouldn't work as such an effective

painting as in fact it does.

I bet you if that Irv Novick panel was shown that size, that it

would have a huge graphic power of its own.

It would have a cohesiveness which this... This, to me, isn't cohesive.

This, to me, everything interesting about that image, which is

a representation of three-dimensional space, of a real event happening.

This, to me, is just flattened. This, to me looks...

It's a piece of abstract painting.

He said he wanted to hide the record of his hand.

For him, he's bouncing off a previous generation of artists.

Abstract painters,

people like Jackson Pollock who were all about gesture, expression.

He's saying, "I want it to appear flat and impersonal

"and mechanical because that is the world I live in.

"And in fact, that's what I want to get across."

So everything you are saying, I think, you could argue,

plays into his hands. I don't know. Have I convinced you at all?

I'm afraid you haven't convinced me at all,

you know, from the point of view that I come from.

I find there's something slightly dishonest about it.

There is something that's kind of trying to be ironic,

but I think it doesn't actually work.

It seems to be doing a disservice to comic art, because of that.

Although Lichtenstein's work is so phenomenally popular,

-you could argue that he's on the side of comics.

-Yes.

I mean, I'd have to agree to try and find a point of harmony on it.

In the '60s, '70s, for a short while,

the mighty Marvel comics group rechristened itself Marvel

Pop Art Productions because stuff like this, in the eyes of culture,

had kind of said, "Hey, these aren't just comics for kids.

"These could be the next big artistic wave."

-It lasted about three or four months, I think.

-Be honest with me, Dave.

Is there any part of you which is a bit narked by the fact

that I could buy this for £5.95 and clearly, if this ever came onto

the market, it would be worth tens and tens of millions of pounds?

That's doesn't nark me at all. This is worth, to me, far more than that.

What, for real? If you were offered this, you wouldn't have this.

-You'd take the Irv Novick original?

-Absolutely.

Bud.

If you think Lichtenstein's pop paintings are contentious today,

just imagine their impact, how strange

and scandalous they must have appeared, when they first landed in Britain.

London, 1968.

And Whaam! The man once described as America's worst artist comes to town

for an important solo exhibition at the Tate Gallery.

It's the first time the gallery has devoted a show to a living

American artist, and it's packed with Brits

who want to see what all the fuss is about.

Two years earlier, the Tate had bought Whaam! for nearly £4,000,

causing a bust-up between the trustees.

So unsurprisingly, a whole gallery full of Lichtensteins

was bound to detonate a response.

# Hey, hey, goodbye. #

The whole of this exhibition is pulling something over

everybody and, judging by the average age of the people around,

they're just not sophisticated enough to notice.

-I like the one looking in the mirror.

-Why?

-Because the dots are bigger, I suppose.

-Don't like it.

I don't like it at all.

It's a comment, I suppose, on this age in which we live.

And I'm not sure yet whether it's a very critical comment.

The show was a sell-out.

The American who did big comics had made a massive impact.

Now, Richard Morphet,

you were an assistant curator at the Tate in the '60s.

It's amazing to think that this is now one of the big crowd pullers

at the Tate but, when it was bought in '66,

it was the cause of all this infighting.

Yes, infighting not amongst the staff but, it seems,

amongst the trustees.

The older generation found this almost completely

unacceptable as a kind of art.

I mean, they basically thought that it wasn't dealing with serious matters.

It wasn't dealing with the kind of humane,

subtle preoccupations that they thought should be at the heart

of art as well as it being such outrageous subject matter.

So for them,

-it was an affront to everything that art was supposed to be?

-It was.

They thought that popular and commercial things were degraded

and really would be polluting fine art.

When one met people, if you went out to supper with friends

and they learned that you worked at the Tate,

they immediately - this is in 1966 - raised the issue of Whaam!

and they said, "It's outrageous that the Tate should buy something

"which is simply a clipping from a strip comic."

This was bought by the Tate in 1966. Big fuss.

Had that controversy abated at all by the time of the big

Lichtenstein exhibition at the Tate two years later in '68?

Among certain people, it had not and it went on for years.

But in fact, within those two years,

a huge momentum of enthusiasm for Lichtenstein's work had built up,

so the exhibition was an enormous success, you know.

There were kind of crowd problems.

And, you know, young people in general were exhilarated by it.

And his work simply took its place in the story of art and that

was a done deal, as it were.

Lichtenstein's comic book paintings are what he is most famous for.

But he created them within a period of five years.

He still had 30 years of his career ahead of him.

Once Lichtenstein had fine-tuned his look - the hard outlines,

primary colours, and lots of dots,

he stuck with it.

It wasn't broke.

Neither was he.

When he waved goodbye to fighter jet pilots and sobbing girls in 1965,

he looked to his future and wondered, "What else can I cover in dots?"

He turned to the great modern masters.

He did nudes.

Sculpture.

The idea of doing it in a ceramic and in three dimensions was particularly interesting to me,

because to put these half-tone dots and these same two-dimensional

symbols on an actual three-dimensional surface

and to make a cartooned image,

the symbols of which seem to be associated, let's say, with a flat,

working two-dimensional surface, was something that interested me quite a bit.

And brushstrokes,

an ironic wink towards

the wild emotion of abstract expressionism, whose intimidating influence he had managed to escape.

And finally, a series of Chinese landscapes.

The dots now more subtle in a slow tonal fade,

suggesting delicate mists.

Sometimes people say, well, you know, he didn't change.

He was kind of, like, more of one line.

And I really think just the opposite.

I think, "My gosh, look at all the different approaches

"he made to his work,

"going from very kind of modernist style paintings to

"the different type of cartoon images

"to the two-dimensional sculptures but a very wide variety."

Lichtenstein's well-known for engaging with low culture,

but something that's perhaps a little less familiar is

that, in the early '60s when he began his comic book paintings,

he also did a series that were based on art.

This is a Lichtenstein version of a Picasso.

He's taken his source, he's stamped it with his own identity

and, in this room, you can see he's done that several times.

In this series from later in the '60s,

he's dealing with Monet's famous series of Rouen cathedral.

Lichtenstein called these works his "idiot versions"

because they do seem slightly moronic,

half-witted representations of beautiful other paintings,

how it would be if it was reproduced endlessly, mashed up, mauled.

It's almost quite aggressive.

There's another idiot version of a Mondrian behind,

which lends itself a little more closely to Lichtenstein's style.

But, the thing is, he was much more respectful of art history

than people often give him credit for.

He's always fundamentally engaged with painting.

He once said, "The things that I have apparently parodied,

"I actually admire."

For designer and architect Ron Arad, Lichtenstein's parodies are never straightforward.

There's always more than one layer.

This is...like you look at it and no-one needs to tell you this

is a Lichtenstein because it has all the hallmarks.

This is done very late, like in the '90s.

But, yet, it's not as if he's a one-trick pony...

..it keeps producing the same stuff, it's always a new idea.

And in this case, it's the reflection.

I mean, we're seeing a Picasso, yes.

It's difficult to read this, it's a complicated image.

When you see paintings in museums,

-and there's the reflective glass in front of...

-Oh, is that what this is?

-That's what it is.

-Ah!

-That's what I think it is.

-Of course.

It's a Picasso in the frame

and there's a pane of glass in front of it that disturbs us.

And it makes enjoyment out of the interference.

The reflection is the enemy of museums and galleries.

This is, "It's not the enemy. If you can't beat them, join them."

Also in this room, we've got all of the sculptures too.

It has Picasso and it has the Cubists and it has Matisse there

-and it has Lichtenstein.

-I feel like this is a real distillation of form.

That's what he's doing. It's an interrogation, if you like, a cliche.

He's saying, "What is the minimum I can get away with?"

I don't think it's about getting away, I think he just felt like doing that.

For me, it looks like there's a freedom to try

and experiment that he earned with his work

and all the experiments are done within a look that we grew to accept.

All these have a lot of "what ifs?". What if I do this?

And there's no reason not to do it and he does it.

Is that the lesson for you? That he liberates artists?

Yes, the lesson for us is to do first and then think. Just do it.

If you're interested in something,

if something excites you to explore, you do it.

You don't have to justify it.

Personally, I think that Lichtenstein was having

a lot of fun in his later work.

He identified the ticks and tropes associated with

a number of different styles and offered them up almost as logos.

He had a lifelong interest in form.

He didn't paint things, he painted style.

This offered up all sorts of mind-wrenching conundrums.

Now, here's a painting that I bet, if you hadn't seen it before

and didn't know the title, you'd be hard pressed to guess what it is.

In fact, it's a self portrait

and Lichtenstein's having a bit of fun, clearly.

He doesn't actually appear in the work.

In the place of his head, there's a mirror.

There's no body, instead just an empty, blank white T-shirt

with a label that doesn't even have a brand name on it.

So none of the great self revelation of famous self portraits of the past.

There are no eyes which are windows onto the soul,

no wrinkles or lines bespeaking crumpled experience.

Instead, it's just quit flat, typical Lichtenstein.

At the same time, it's a statement of identity.

It seems completely anonymous, but because that style is so immediately recognisable,

you know who did this, it screams Lichtenstein.

For me, this paradox is at the heart of Lichtenstein's work.

He's the artist who passes himself off as the invisible man.

Yet, in doing so,

he emblazons himself indelibly on the pages of art history.

Roy Lichtenstein has become one of the most influential artists

that America's ever produced.

Take Damien Hirst's infamous million-dollar dots

or Julian Opie's stark, flattened faces.

Jeff Koons's cartoonish fantasies.

And now, a new generation, including New York artist Cory Arcangel

who hacked a well-known computer game to create Super Mario clouds.

Lichtenstein and his dots may have evolved from the pages of cheap commercial printing,

but they also anticipated today's pixellated world.

And you don't have to be an art critic to sense that

the British artist Michael Craig-Martin is in dialogue with his American predecessor.

Michael's particularly excited by Lichtenstein's later work.

-It is one of his greatest paintings, I think.

-Really?

-Definitely.

I remember the first time I saw it, took my breath away

because I think it's so immensely powerful.

Its scale, its confidence in the drawing, its use of patterning.

This is a great masterpiece.

So you think that this is more of a masterpiece than some of those

early comic book, cartoon paintings?

Well, I love the early comic book paintings

and the early advertising images,

but I think that it's extraordinary the way that he was able to

take the language that exists so naturally in them

and expand that language to enable him

to do such a complex painting as this, that's got

so many different references, so many different things going on in it.

There's the water lilies, which is obviously Monet's water lilies

and then we have a late Jasper Johns, we have a scene of Egypt,

we have a woman in a bikini,

all of these different things have been drawn into that.

Anybody looking at this picture,

they're reminded of the language of comic strips, that he has been

able to turn this language into something that allows him

to touch on everything.

-It's a painting about paintings.

-It is.

I think this is about as challenging a contemporary painting as you can see.

I wonder whether you could try and unpick the way that he has managed

to unify elements and areas that, on paper, shouldn't go together at all.

Subtle details like this very...

ALARM SOUNDS

I keep on doing that and it's very unfortunate.

You want to get into the painting, that's the problem.

You can see the orange which is used for the ashtray by the bed,

which is picked up in the eye of the Jasper Johns.

In a way, there's no need within the composition of the picture to

have such a small object.

It's a tiny object.

But what he's doing is he's using the object to allow himself to put

a bit of orange there which he needs in order to light up this spot.

If you look, within all the colours there, it's the most foreign colour.

There's only a little bit of it, but it's lighting up the whole area.

I wonder how much Lichtenstein has been a touchstone in your work,

because superficially there are similarities between you

both as artists. You also use the black outline, the flat colour.

I think of myself as having tried to make a language which

I could apply to as many different things as possible.

For me, certainly,

if anything, that's the thing that I would say I've taken from his work.

When Lichtenstein died in 1997, it was the end of a career

spanning half a century, in which he'd created nearly 5,000 works.

This is his biggest exhibition ever held in Britain and I think

it should transform the way that many people think about him.

The show is about to open to the public,

but first, the critics have been allowed in to give their judgment

and I've managed to collar one of them before he escapes,

Jonathan Jones, who writes for the Guardian newspaper.

Jonathan, what's your take? Do you think it's any good?

Well, of course it's good.

It's a dazzling exhibition, he's a dazzling artist.

I just wonder if the dazzle, for me, is a little bit polished.

It's a little bit surface and brilliant.

He takes this really powerful style, hugely original,

totally unique to him, a trademark almost.

And is he trapped by his style? Does he become the prisoner of it?

I see it the other way round,

because I feel like he was a prisoner of other people's styles,

he couldn't get past them in the '50s, the period

when he was trying to forge his own identity,

and this style that he creates liberates him.

In some of the late work, don't you see a kind of free-wheeling,

zany, anarchic use of colour and pattern exploding

and pulsating, which has so much energy,

some of the energy that perhaps you're not seeing in the artist,

maybe it is there in those late pictures?

I disagree. For me, the '60s stuff is fantastic.

There's an electrical quality to them, the Ben-Day dots, they're not

-just dots, they hum on the wall, they fizz and just gradually fizzles away.

-Tails off.

That's what it does for me. It's witty and it's kind of beautiful.

Very witty, very succinct and yet I feel he's just ever so slightly

intellectually lazy and every so slightly emotionally self-satisfied.

For me, the great artists like Picasso...

Picasso was worth bringing in because he makes reference a lot to Picasso

and he does his versions of Picasso and Picasso did loads of versions of other people's work.

It was always art about art and yet it always bites much deeper.

It bites that much harder. Maybe what I'm really saying with Lichtenstein is,

Roy Lichtenstein is the style rather than a man.

Whether that's a good or a bad thing,

-that style has certainly proved lucrative.

-At 35 million.

36 million...

But Lichtenstein's paintings are about more than their price tags.

They helped make modern art mainstream.

50 years after many of them were created,

we still find them exhilarating.

What really surprised me was the range of his work.

I had no idea of the other genres and styles that he'd pastiched,

but in a really paintily way.

I expected to see the images that you see everywhere, T-shirts,

tea towels, bedspreads, the whole kind of thing.

It's nice to see it live. It's not just flat and boring.

I was surprised generally by how different his artwork was

compared to what I thought I'd already known about him.

The story of basically how he came to paint the way he did

is more interesting to me, as much as anything else,

because it's symptomatic of the time.

I thought this was a show that really showed much more range

and depth to him as an artist.

What I find really exciting about this exhibition is that it's

made me think about Roy Lichtenstein in an entirely new way.

People sometimes assume that pop art is a bit superficial,

a bit glib, but Lichtenstein wasn't a one-trick pony just

ripping off cartoons and comics.

Of course, his paintings are funny, they're bold, they're punchy,

but I now realise they're also filled with all sorts

of sophisticated insights and references to

the culture around him and also, above all, to art.

It turns out that this controversial pop artist, who's been

so influential on advertising and design and, ultimately,

has shaped the world around us,

was above all else a traditional painter,

whose supposedly dumb-looking pictures always

operate with real intelligence and wit.

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