Cold Shoulder
Roy Lichtenstein
ROY LICHTENSTEIN, 1963. OIL AND MAGNA ON CANVAS.
There is the deception of ease in Lichtenstein’s paintings. So accurately does he recreate the medium of comic books and mass production that one can forget the painstaking work he undertook to hand-paint each benday dot, flat plane and standardised type. Recontextualising frames from the comic books, in this case DC’s ‘Girls Romance’, which were experiencing a new renaissance by the early 1960s, he brought the visual language of the masses into high art. By isolating single frames, outside of the narrative in which they were intended, Lichtenstein frees them to interpretation and makes us question why we see them as different worth if shown on the page versus the canvas. “I don’t think that whatever is meant by the artist it is important to art.”, he said. Instead, we are free to interpret these images, conceived first by comic book artist and then by Lichtenstein, however we please. This, ultimately, is the difference between the source material and finished work – removing the context and narrative removes the intention of the artist, leaving the viewer to finish the piece simply by looking at it.