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拍品專文
This work will be included in the catalogue raisonné being prepared by the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, New York.
VIIP!-- the word bursts with all the energy of Pop. Executed in 1962, only a year after Lichtenstein had begun to create what would soon become his hallmark images culled from cartoons and other popular media, VIIP! appears to show a small explosion, as though a bullet or a small missile has been fired. Several of Lichtenstein's early works included the discharge of weaponry and the accompanying onomatopoeic words used by comics artists and writers to designate the sounds there-be it the BRATTATA or the TAKKA TAKKA of a machinegun, the BLAM! of a plane being blown up, the WHAM! of a fighter firing a missile at an enemy aircraft or simply VAROOM! In VIIP!, Lichtenstein has deliberately focussed on a single panel of action, detached from any narrative. Who is firing? Who is being fired at? This isolated fragment from the popular media becomes at once mysterious and, taken out of context, placed incongruously on a wall, deliberately absurd.
This absurdity extends also to the entire process by which Lichtenstein was taking cartoon images, panels from humble publications often scorned by the so-called cognoscenti, and placing them within the hallowed confines of the art world. They have been meticulously rendered by brush on canvas, a process that is double-sided. On the one hand, the role of the artist, formerly so gestural, personal and expansive in the hands of the Abstract Expressionists, is reduced to that of a machine. And on the other hand, Lichtenstein is taking the most humble, discarded, overlooked shard of the everyday life of everyday people, an isolated panel from a comic that says 'VIIP!' and is granting it a new status, allowing it to stake its claim within the realms of 'High Art.' This is therefore a process of redemption... and attack. And it is a reflection of Lichtenstein's original desire to be subversive, to accost people's sense of taste and propriety, that when asked, the year after VIIP! was painted, to define what exactly Pop Art was, he replied:
"I don't know-- the use of commercial art as subject matter in painting, I suppose. It was hard to get a painting that was despicable enough so that no one would hang it-- everybody was hanging everything. It was almost acceptable to hang a dripping paint rag, everybody was accustomed to this. The one thing everyone hated was commercial art; apparently they didn't hate that enough either" (Lichtenstein in 1963, quoted in G.R. Swenson, 'Roy Lichtenstein: an interview', pp. 7-9 in Roy Lichtenstein, exh. cat., London 1968, p. 7).
VIIP!-- the word bursts with all the energy of Pop. Executed in 1962, only a year after Lichtenstein had begun to create what would soon become his hallmark images culled from cartoons and other popular media, VIIP! appears to show a small explosion, as though a bullet or a small missile has been fired. Several of Lichtenstein's early works included the discharge of weaponry and the accompanying onomatopoeic words used by comics artists and writers to designate the sounds there-be it the BRATTATA or the TAKKA TAKKA of a machinegun, the BLAM! of a plane being blown up, the WHAM! of a fighter firing a missile at an enemy aircraft or simply VAROOM! In VIIP!, Lichtenstein has deliberately focussed on a single panel of action, detached from any narrative. Who is firing? Who is being fired at? This isolated fragment from the popular media becomes at once mysterious and, taken out of context, placed incongruously on a wall, deliberately absurd.
This absurdity extends also to the entire process by which Lichtenstein was taking cartoon images, panels from humble publications often scorned by the so-called cognoscenti, and placing them within the hallowed confines of the art world. They have been meticulously rendered by brush on canvas, a process that is double-sided. On the one hand, the role of the artist, formerly so gestural, personal and expansive in the hands of the Abstract Expressionists, is reduced to that of a machine. And on the other hand, Lichtenstein is taking the most humble, discarded, overlooked shard of the everyday life of everyday people, an isolated panel from a comic that says 'VIIP!' and is granting it a new status, allowing it to stake its claim within the realms of 'High Art.' This is therefore a process of redemption... and attack. And it is a reflection of Lichtenstein's original desire to be subversive, to accost people's sense of taste and propriety, that when asked, the year after VIIP! was painted, to define what exactly Pop Art was, he replied:
"I don't know-- the use of commercial art as subject matter in painting, I suppose. It was hard to get a painting that was despicable enough so that no one would hang it-- everybody was hanging everything. It was almost acceptable to hang a dripping paint rag, everybody was accustomed to this. The one thing everyone hated was commercial art; apparently they didn't hate that enough either" (Lichtenstein in 1963, quoted in G.R. Swenson, 'Roy Lichtenstein: an interview', pp. 7-9 in Roy Lichtenstein, exh. cat., London 1968, p. 7).