ROY LICHTENSTEIN (1923-1997) Sale 1150, Lot 30 Happy Tears Magna on canvas Painted in 1964 Estimate: $5,000,000-7,000,000 By Barbara Rose Roy Lichtenstein's 1964 classic pop icon, Happy Tears, wittily strips bare the American psyche. Almost four decades after Lichtenstein's Happy Tears the major innovations of the artists of the Sixties become increasingly clear. Two most influential artists - Warhol and Lichtenstein - are gone. Lichtenstein, unlike Warhol, was an ironist rather than a moralist. There is always a witty twist to his handling of subjects. Warhol's dark vision stressed the tragedy of recent American history, but Lichtenstein's classic themes are images drawn from the innocent if superficial world of American teenagers. For boys this meant war comics. Teenage girls, however, received their sentimental education from 'love comics' illustrating formula stories of lost and found romance. This seldom-noted distinction between the masculine and feminine in Lichtenstein's iconography speaks volumes regarding the dichotomy in the American psyche. Boys dreamed of fighting and competing, but girls were passive victims of their emotions. By the time André Malraux proclaimed the primacy of the art book as 'the museum without walls', reproductions had turned masterpieces into clichés. To make art fresh again, artists like Lichtenstein had to look to popular culture, as Courbet had in the 19th century. Only now that culture was the lowest form of kitsch and false sentiment. Taking John Cage's advice to wake up to the life they were living, the Sixties generation of American artists painted, drew and sculpted urban mass culture, not bucolic nature. A native New Yorker, Lichtenstein had studied with the leading American Scene painter Reginald Marsh at the Art Students' League. Indeed, in many respects, pop art can be seen as the translation of American Scene painting, essentially an illustrational provincial style, into a contemporary international modernist idiom. During the late Fifties, Lichtenstein painted abstract-expressionist parodies of Remington's cowboy-and-Indian scenes. By 1961, however, he had turned his attention from kitsch history painting to primitive newspaper and phone-book advertisements. His first cartoon image was a giant Mickey Mouse he created for his children. Liked more by the public than the critics, Lichtenstein's show of pop paintings in 1962 at the Leo Castelli gallery sold out. By this time, he was consciously borrowing his imagery from reproductions and using Ben Day dots. To stress that they were based on mass-produced reproduction he enlarged the dots using stencil. Their banal source was further emphasized by the flat unmodulated local colour representing the limited chromatic range of comic books. Lichtenstein's cartoon style was double-edged, apparently naïve but actually highly sophisticated. His adoption of the subliminal abstraction of the dots, lines, and stripes used to depict objects in comics and in cheap advertisements was one of his many deadpan disguises. The choice of his images and his reductive style obscured his intentions in a way that made the paintings both accessible to the general public and irritating to experts who viewed him as a philistine. BARBARA ROSE IS A NOTED AMERICAN ART CRITIC AND PROLIFIC AUTHOR OF POST-WAR AND CONTEMPORARY ART Back to top