Roy Lichtenstein: Pop Idol

It's 1961.

You are a mild-mannered, frustrated 37-year-old art teacher, whose career in art is going nowhere.

You believe American art doesn't reflect the excitement of America.

You decide what DOES reflect that excitement is comic-book art -

the imagery of the commercial world.

You apply high-art techniques, your paintings hang in a major gallery.

You are Roy Lichtenstein. You are a major figure in American art.

You have changed the direction of American art. You have superpowers.

'Roy Lichtenstein, Pop Idol.

'See Roy's incredible rags-to-riches story.

'The man who blew away the art world with his fabulous and super-cool paintings and made millions.

'It wasn't always that way, folks.

'In the early years, Roy struggled against poverty, obscurity and failure.

'How will Roy get out of this one?

'All this in Roy Lichtenstein, Pop Idol.'

Roy Lichtenstein is best known for his detached, ironic comic paintings

of chiselled-jawed men and weeping girls.

When the work first appeared in 1962,

it seemed someone had dragged images off the billboards outside

and stuck them up on the walls of the gallery.

Lichtenstein challenged people's conceptions of art,

and in doing so became one of the defining image-makers of the 1960s.

Roy Lichtenstein was born in 1923, and grew up here in the Upper West Side of New York,

when it was home to a community of affluent Jewish emigres.

His father was a property developer.

His sister remembers how they lived next door to a Russian composer.

There's a plaque there to Rachmaninov.

I can remember we would sit on the indoor steps -

the steps inside the building - and listen to Rachmaninov practise.

But life in the Lichtenstein home was quiet.

'My mother was very funny,'

but she kept her distance.

She wasn't emotional,

'and I think not very concerned about us.

Roy grew shy and withdrawn, but quietly determined.

As a teenager, he felt the need to spend more time away from home, to escape into an exciting new world.

'Roy develops an interest in jazz

'and spends his evenings up in Harlem, listening to Count Basie and Lester Young at the Apollo.

'These performances inspire his first paintings, Picasso-style portraits of jazz musicians.'

But his parents still didn't take him seriously.

'They didn't think he was destined for greatness. I'm afraid not.'

It would be a miracle if he finished college, and heaven knows what he'd do after that!

When America joined the Second World War, all questions about Roy's future were put on hold.

He was drafted into the Air Force.

Unlike the heroic pilots he painted later, he never got to fly a plane.

Instead, he landed a desk job as a map maker.

Roy's artistic skills gained the attention of his commanding officer,

who ordered him to copy newspaper cartoons to stick on the mess wall.

Lichtenstein later remembered finding the job stupid.

Cartoons weren't his idea of art.

At least, they weren't yet.

Roy finally got to see some action in 1944,

when he was called up for the Battle of the Bulge, the largest American offensive in the war.

He spoke about being in combat, at one point, and it was incredible.

He saw incredible things happening -

the sky lighting up, the firing of the guns,

and he stood up.

Somebody pulled him down, and said, "You wanna get killed, you fool?!"

Because it was just so incredible.

He said that he was taken by the beauty of it.

After Armistice, Roy was stationed in Paris and visited the galleries.

By now, he was intent on becoming an artist. He even tried to visit his hero Picasso.

But his awe for him was so great that he got scared

and ran away without even knocking on the studio door.

Coming back to America after the war, retaining a youthful belief in the power of art,

Lichtenstein seemed a long way from the irritant who, 15 years later,

was vandalising galleries with what appeared to be anti-art.

In 1946, he enrolled at Ohio State University, majoring in art.

Sculptor Tom Doyle was there with him.

Everyone knew he was going to be a champ, you know what I mean?

He was like the star of the art department out there.

He was just so...so different than everybody there.

He had that kind of knowing something,

like he knew something you didn't, you know what I mean?

It's like someone who has a secret.

Already, Roy was known for his satirical humour,

poking fun at American institutional life, particularly the military.

We were in a class, a drawing class, when MacArthur resigned

and made that great speech, "Old soldiers never die, they just fade away."

Roy and I laughed like hell! We were laughing.

And all the other students were just horrified that we are laughing at this great general, you know.

This playfulness features in Roy's early work.

Superficially, this painting may look like another art-school Picasso imitation,

but look in the top left-hand corner, and you see that it's taken from an advert for corned beef.

In the year 1954,

I was assigned to write about an artist called Roy Lichtenstein,

whom I had never heard of before, nor had anybody else.

There was a picture of a dollar bill,

and a picture of George Washington crossing the Delaware,

but these relatively vulgar subjects were executed

in a kind of tired, you know, modern, art-school style.

Lichtenstein seems only a step away from his later pop work.

He had to shed the self-consciously arty style in which he painted these commercial images. He wasn't ready,

nor was the abstract expressionist art world.

Its major figures - Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning - were like a holy trinity of gloom.

The images of everyday life were inadequate for representing the tragedy of the human condition,

replaced with wild splashes and sweeps of paint.

In 1949, an article in Life magazine called Pollock "the greatest artist in America".

Ever since then, most younger avant-garde painters imitated his expressive style.

By comparison, Lichtenstein's early work seems stubbornly childish.

At odds with the art scene, the champ of Ohio State College slipped out of the limelight.

He'd married in 1949, and he and his wife Isabel had two sons.

Lichtenstein could only find work teaching in Oswego,

right up in the mountains by the Canadian border.

It was not a good move.

He had the kids, you know, and he had the dog,

but it didn't seem...

I don't know, it seems like he was kind of, like, floating or something.

I didn't feel like he was all that happy.

She wasn't happy. She was really unhappy when they went to Oswego, you know,

because no-one would ever visit them there.

It's like way to hell...

It's like Siberia, or something.

Isabel became depressed and turn to alcohol.

In the evenings, Roy took refuge in his studio.

But knowing that his style was at odds with the mood of the times,

he was suffering an identity crisis.

What should he paint?

Craving success and recognition, he dabbled in abstract expressionism.

It was a compromise, and the paintings from this time

lack the energy and gentle humour of his best work.

He never really was interested

in the abstract expressionist paintings

that he was doing. I think they probably felt false to him,

but he did feel as if he was stuck in the boondocks,

and he was.

But Roy was secretly working on something different.

To his mind, American society was in a state of rapid change, and he wanted to reflect this in his work.

Enjoying economic boom, the country was beginning its obsession with consumerism.

The images were no longer in the art gallery,

but on television, billboards and comic books.

Lichtenstein instinctively felt

that art must come out of its ivory tower,

and respond to this visual challenge.

In a series of sketches from the late 1950s,

he began to experiment with familiar cartoon characters.

'I was doing them

'sort of immersed in abstract expressionism.

'It was a kind of abstract expressionist image

'with these cartoons within this expressionist image.

'It's a little hard to picture, I think, and the paintings themselves weren't very successful.'

He was right, they weren't.

He had yet to find a way of using the images of the commercial world

without concealing them in the house style of American art.

So, for the time being, he continued with his lightweight abstract work.

Throughout the '50s, Lichtenstein's determined quest

to get the attention of the art world was going nowhere.

Every tack he pursued was greeted with lukewarm response.

As 1960 approached, he was in his late 30's, and getting desperate.

As the new decade began, Lichtenstein's luck changed.

He got a teaching post at Douglas College, just outside New York.

He was back at the heart of the avant-garde art scene.

There were other artists like him, sick of abstract expressionism,

and keen to engage with the world around them.

In Flag, Jasper Johns took America's most beloved image

presenting it in faded tones, looking ragged and worn.

Robert Rauschenberg used materials often outside of the artist's reach,

using newspaper and magazine cuttings to add texture to the background of his work.

An underground art scene based at Douglas College held live performances or happenings

that challenged people's conceptions of what was and was not art.

Change was in the air.

This move also shook up Lichtenstein's personal life, and he separated from Isabel.

Letty Lou Eisenhauer became a close friend and later his lover.

'He came to Douglas'

and he met all of these people who had a whole different vision of what art was.

It took him a while to acclimate and then, I think,

he slowly began to move in a new direction.

I think he was beginning to see that there was something else there

that you could make art out of, besides abstract ideas.

Lichtenstein realised that his abstract painting had taken him down a creative cul-de-sac.

Seeing how dated his work was in comparison with other New York artists, he had a breakthrough.

One day, in the spring of 1961,

he returned to the cartoon imagery he'd been toying with for so long.

But this time, he was to do something very unusual.

'In doing these paintings, I had, of course, the original strip cartoons to look at,

'and the idea of doing one without apparent alteration just occurred to me.

'I did one really almost half seriously, only to get an idea of what it might look like,

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

'and brought it to conclusiveness as an aesthetic statement,

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

The result of this experimentation was Look, Mickey.

If the unaltered cartoon image didn't represent a manifesto for a new art form in itself,

then the text made it clear.

Roy, in the guise of Donald Duck, told the world he was onto something big.

But while the painting was bold, Roy's characteristic caution made him hesitant.

I was with Roy, and we were in the car going to pick up some beer,

and Roy is telling me about the Donald Duck painting.

And I'm saying, "Yeah, yeah, turn here. Stop there, so I can get the beer."

And he's saying, "What do you think of this idea?"

He wasn't sure whether it was art or not.

The curious thing, he said, is that when he looked at this painting,

he was appalled by it,

and that, in a way, he had to get beyond his own taste

to be able to continue to do that, because it looked so unlike art.

But Roy overcame his reservations, and during the summer of 1961,

worked at a feverish pace on the first of his "pop paintings".

He copied the images of newspaper adverts and comic strips, and the techniques which created them.

The wild gestural brushstroke of the abstract expressionists

gave way to a simple illustrative line.

His palette was one or two primary colours,

and sometimes no colours at all.

He often abandoned the paintbrush in favour of stencils and rollers.

The word looked as if it was created by a machine rather than a human being.

Miniature benday dots are used in newspaper ads in various densities

to create the illusion of modelling in light and shadow.

Lichtenstein enlarged them absurdly, and they became his signature.

They demonstrated how he relished the drama of abstraction, but transformed it into a cartoon.

But while Lichtenstein had managed to convince himself, would he be able to convince others?

The Castelli Gallery, here on the Upper East Side, was an important gallery in New York at the time.

Leo Castelli had made Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns famous.

If Roy got a show here, this new art might take off.

At the time, Ivan Karp was Castelli's right-hand man.

A friend called him and asked him to look at the work of Roy Lichtenstein.

On the landing, just before the gallery levelled,

was this young man in front of some canvasses.

I said, "Are you the person who was sent by my friend out in New Jersey?"

He said, "Yes, I'm Roy Lichtenstein."

I asked him to deploy his works, wherever spaces there were,

between the paintings on display, and I had a rather startling reaction.

I said something like, "I'm not sure you're allowed to do things like this!"

I think that was the phrase that I issued forth at the time.

They were so startling and so contrary to the general prevailing current of the art at the time,

and they were, in a sense, immediately buoyant and refreshing.

I wanted Leo to see them.

And when Leo saw them, he was not appalled.

He said, "This is so dead-centre American, isn't it?

We'll leave some paintings here and see the reaction.

There was a certain buzz in New York.

Unbeknownst to each other, a number of different artists

started creating similar work at EXACTLY the same time.

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.

Andy Warhol was known only as a successful commercial illustrator.

In private, he also made some of his own cartoon paintings, not unlike Lichtenstein's.

Through the autumn of 1961, Roy waited on tenterhooks

as Castelli considered the work of both artists.

He said it's between me and another guy. I said, "Who's the other guy?"

And he says, "Andy Warhol." I said, "Who the hell is Andy Warhol?!"

I'd never heard of Andy Warhol.

He does, "Miller Shoe ads." I said, "Forget about that guy!

"You'll never hear from him again!"

Leo Castelli found Warhol a little too exotic as a personality,

and decided to do a show of Lichtenstein's work alone.

Warhol realised that without Castelli's patronage, he'd look like a follower of Lichtenstein,

so he abandoned his cartoon work for something different.

The result was the bold graphically enhanced Campbell's soup cans.

The distinctive repetition of this mundane everyday image was to make Warhol famous.

And in the spring of 1962, Lichtenstein had his legendary debut at the Castelli gallery.

He had hoped that his work was unusual, but he never anticipated the outrage it would cause.

There was profound hostility to his work.

The formal arts press...

There was nobody - except possibly Professor Robert Rosenblum - who was positive about it.

When you first saw the works, they looked unspeakably ugly,

er...which of course could be either a point of fascination or repulsion.

You're really forced

to look at how creepy, strange,

a woman in a dishwasher ad really looked.

I had just never seen anything like it.

There was no place for me

to compare it to or rationalise for or against it.

I was just confused, like I said.

And it was a very pleasant feeling.

Lichtenstein's intention was not just to undermine the hallowed notion of art.

For years, he'd searched for ways of expressing his real self.

This was it.

The comic paintings hung on the wall were cool, ironic, even fetishistic.

For Roy, a cool, ironic kind of guy,

this was the most honest, personal form of expression he could find.

Gone was the artist as tortured mystic.

To his critics, the work seemed banal.

Two collectors bought all the works,

at very humble prices, as you can imagine.

Hundreds of dollars for a painting.

We considered it a success that anybody bought these works.

They were so disconnected from prevailing modes. It was shattering.

And so it was a commercial success in that regard.

Lichtenstein's quest for artistic success had reached a climax. He was no longer the underdog.

He had outwitted Mickey Mouse. He had beaten up Bluto.

He had avoided the bullying tactics of the abstract expressionists.

His tone and technique were finer and had infinite possibilities.

As an artist, he could see clearly, because he was the King of New York.

He was now the hero that he'd always wanted to be.

Lichtenstein's success meant he could afford studio space in New York and assistants to help him.

The next few years were his most productive period,

resulting in the war paintings and crying-girl series.

The comic-book paintings weren't an indifferent manufactured exercise in appropriation and objectivity.

They could be violent, melodramatic.

They were an intensification of the excitement the subject had for him.

They enabled him to play out a series of satisfying fantasies.

Through the paintings, he told stories of his personal life and life as a painter.

I have a feeling that the male figures are often Roy himself,

these handsome gorgeous figures.

Roy wasn't handsome.

This is a fantasy about who you want to be and what you want - the beautiful girl.

He got the beautiful girl.

You want the elegant life of these people. You got that, then.

In the early-'60s, there was the end of his marriage, girlfriends.

While the women in his life changed, there was one consistent image he painted - the crying girl.

Perhaps the girl was crying because of Lichtenstein's disappointment in the cliches of romantic love.

Perhaps the girl was crying because Roy Lichtenstein was saying,

"I want a beautiful girl to cry over me the way these girls are crying over the men in their lives."

Then again, it's possible that Lichtenstein empathised more

with the submissive girls than their heartbreaking hunks.

We had a game we used to play, where I would burst through the door from having come in from graduate school,

and say something like, "I'm going to grab you and rape you!"

And he would go, "Ooh! Ooh! Ooh!"

And run around the room very slowly so I could catch him.

In 1965, he was able to leave behind the commercial imagery

that had satisfied all sorts of psychological and artistic needs, and return to high-art subjects.

The big brushstroke painting tamed the passion and spontaneity

of expressionist brushstroke into something cool and simply an image.

He had turned abstract expressionism into a cartoon,

both as a tribute, but to announce that he'd found a style all his own,

and he could do anything with it that he wanted.

And that's just what he did.

For the next 30 years, he presented a sort of history of the world according to Roy Lichtenstein.

There were landscapes with benday dots,

imitations of art with benday dots,

still lifes with benday dots, interiors with benday dots.

Some paintings just seemed to be benday dots alone.

Meanwhile, Roy himself became a well-known society figure - elegant and reserved.

In 1968, he married again -

the beautiful Dorothy Herzka.

He finally had the Brad lifestyle he'd always wanted.

He used to joke and say someone's going to shake him on the shoulders and say,

"Mr Lichtenstein, Mr Lichtenstein, get up, it's time for your pills!"

He'll have been in a coma or something!

He'll still be living in Oswego!

But the more well-known Roy became, the more difficult he was to read.

This self-portrait is revealing in that it is NOT revealing.

His head is significantly a mirror to the world around it, reflecting nothing.

It was as if he wanted to keep his personality out of his art.

Insofar as he had become Brad,

he was in danger of having reduced his life and his work to two dimensions.

He got an idea, did it, but then he was unwilling to move on.

You can take the idea to the next place, to a new step.

He didn't do that.

So was Lichtenstein just a one-hit wonder, intent on reducing everything to a cartoon?

To his admirers, the concept grew to become a style in itself, like Impressionism or Cubism.

Jeff Koons is one of America's most famous artists today,

largely because like Lichtenstein, he exploits commercial, pulp images.

Sometimes people say, "He didn't change.

"It was always like more of one line."

I think just the opposite.

I think, "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."

How do we make sense of Roy Lichtenstein's career?

His later works were like a good album tracks.

They're not as sexy, as immediate, as his early pop hits.

In a way, they are more absorbing and definitely more mature.

I mean, look, this guy, all he ever wanted to do was paint, right?

He worked his ass off, all the time.

That's all he ever did.

He liked cars, he liked to play tennis a little bit, I guess, but...

I think he's a fantastic worker.

By the mid-1980s, Lichtenstein was one of the most successful artists in the world.

His public sculpture and murals were all over the United States.

The Lichtenstein style, once so controversial, became mainstream. His works sold for a vast amount.

In the '90s, his marriage to the establishment was consummated

with a commission of prints to go on the walls of US embassies worldwide.

I don't know what to say. I'm completely overwhelmed.

Nobody screamed or got sick or anything when it was unveiled, so...

Thank you all tremendously.

Roy Lichtenstein never cultivated a celebrity as other pop artists did.

But he had enough of an ego to allow many everyday images that he had turned into high art

to be returned to the commonplace, to come off the gallery walls back to the outside world.

These tended to be items produced in collaboration

with museums that put on major Lichtenstein shows.

At the openings, Roy never wore one of his ties, but Jasper Johns did.

In return, Roy wore a Jasper Johns tie.

I imagine somewhere in New York, Jeff Koons is having a cup of tea

out of a Roy Lichtenstein teapot.

In fact, Lichtenstein's reputation has suffered because of his extraordinary success.

His images are so widespread that we forget how disconcerting they were when they first appeared.

Pinnacle Art Press in New Jersey are doing yet another run of posters

to satisfy the demand for his work.

I am the first pressman on this machine. My son is my operator.

They are popular mainly because of the bright colours.

There's a lot to look at, there are things to read on it.

Overall, it's just an eye-catching piece.

It's large... It would look really nice framed up, I think, along with a couple of other ones.

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

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

I like it.

I'd hang it on my wall.

By the time he died in 1997, the one-time enfant terrible of the New York scene

had become the mellow old man of art.

The world of commerce that he had plundered over 30 years before had swallowed him back up and moved on.

While the world outside the gallery has got more and more garish and spectacular

since Lichtenstein had his big idea, his work DOES retain its power.

He took American art out of the gallery and into the everyday world.

Ironically, you now have to return to the quiet of the gallery,

away from the commercial chaos he predicted to see that Lichtenstein

produced some of the best paintings of his time.

Subtitles by Sarah Aitken BBC Broadcast 2004

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