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拍品專文
An exceptionally rare and early Pop painting by one of the movement’s most critical architects, Voodoo Lily reveals Roy Lichtenstein’s formal and aesthetic maturity, laying the groundwork for several of his later series. Painted in 1961, the first year Lichtenstein began working in his iconic Pop manner, the work demonstrates the artist’s commitment to commercial art, his careful study of his modern forebears, and his skillful technique, choreographing black and white paint against a neutral ground spotted with an early appearance of his most recognizable motif—the Ben-Day dot. The painting is one of only two black-and-white floral still life paintings Lichtenstein made—the other, Black Flowers, 1961, is in the collection of the Broad, Los Angeles—and one of only three flower paintings Lichtenstein produced in the 1960s, before returning to the motif in his later Still life series in 1974. Appropriating imagery from a newspaper advertisement marketing flower seeds, Voodoo Lily is one of Lichtenstein’s first forays into the creative potential of mass-produced visual media, created in tandem with iconic comic paintings such as The Engagement Ring (1961, Private collection), The Kiss (1961, Private collection), and Look Mickey (1961, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). His concurrent series of black-and-white paintings, which includes Bathroom (1961, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York) as well as the present work, embody the artistic innovations which precipitated the birth of Pop in 1961. “The Lichtenstein we instantly recognize today as ‘Lichtenstein’ was presented to the New York art world in 1961,” the critic and curator Robert Pincus-Witten writes. “Overnight, it seemed, he was the embodiment of that intensely innovative moment when Pop art was born” (“Connecting the Dots” in Roy Lichtenstein: Early Black and White Paintings, exh. cat., Gagosian Gallery, New York, 2001, p. 69).
With refined technical skill, Lichtenstein brings to bear his newly discovered minimal vocabulary to the vaunted tradition of Western flower painting in Voodoo Lily. The artist first rescaled his source image using a projector, tracing the outline of the image onto his canvas while simultaneously adjusting the composition to account for scaling distortions. The art historian Robert Rosenblum describes Lichtenstein’s technique for this work, writing how, “prompted by the most low-budget, color-free illustrations in seed catalogues, Lichtenstein could make any decorator cringe by painting flowers in printer’s-ink black and white. With his black thumb, he translated the fragile leaves and blooms of his tulips and lilies into coarsely enlarged hatching, and, with equally crude streaks of white, evoked the ephemeral reflections on a tabletop” (“Roy Lichtenstein’s ‘Rhapsody in Black and White’” in ibid., p. 14). The resulting effect was one of “unexpected refinement,” Lichtenstein here reworking his unsophisticated source into a revolutionary new artistic language. Voodoo Lily marks one of the first examples of Lichtenstein elevating an ephemeral mass-produced commercial image into a unique work of art, a hallmark of the new Pop movement and an enduring aspect of Lichtenstein’s mature works. “[Lichtenstein’s] inventiveness is rooted in imitation,” write James Rondeau and Sheena Wagstaff. “He transformed the very idea of borrowing into a profoundly generative, conceptual position, one that alters the trajectory of Modernism, and beyond. His ephemeral sources are reformed as enduring, precious objects. The works on canvas often look convincingly machine-made, but they are entirely dependent on drawn studies and painted by hand. Impersonal in their collective provenance, they are counterintuitively autographic in their finish” (Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective, exh. cat., The Art Institute of Chicago, 2012, p. 20).
Voodoo Lily is an outstanding early example of Lichtenstein’s painterly mimicry of machine-made imagery. His choice to maintain the referent image’s austere monochromatic palette emphasizes the composition’s origin, revealing the vulgar commercial source of his floral motif. In contradistinction to Andy Warhol’s Flowers series begun three years later, where Warhol mechanically warped images of hibiscus flowers published in a magazine to make the flowers appear flattened and distorted, enabling him to reproduce the image in large quantities, Lichtenstein elevated his ubiquitous image into an original painting. The Ben-Day background, inspired by the printing process of comic book and commercial images, is equally essential to his ensuing work. “Dots are a critical thing,” Lichtenstein later described (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 2001, p. 71). The painting witnesses an early appearance of his dot pattern, which Lichtenstein first utilized earlier that year in Look Mickey; they lack the machine precision of his later works, adducing a more handmade quality to the work. The Ben-Day dot pattern was first invented for advertising and comics as a cursory and economic way to print indications of volume—as the background to Voodoo Lily, it achieves a two-plane relationship while emphasizing the linear rather than volumetric aspects of the composition, flattening the floral subject in a similar way to Warhol’s silkscreened Flowers. While in this case, Lichtenstein adds a table ledge to adduce a sense of perspective, in his later black and white single-object paintings he places his subject against a Ben-Day void. Uniform from afar, the background in Voodoo Lily has subtle skips and jumps, with some rows of dots impinging on neighboring forms. These imperfections document Lichtenstein’s earliest exploration of his Ben-Day technique, as he was first experimenting with different brushes and stencils to achieve his desired result. As the art historian Harry Cooper notes, these skips mimic printing errors in comic books and advertising as well: “Lichtenstein was a connoisseur of such imperfections, carefully soliciting the look of poor registration” (“On the Dot” in exh. cat., op. cit., 2012, p. 28).
Lichtenstein valued his black-and-white paintings for both their fidelity to his chosen source images and for their esteemed art historical resonances. As the artist explained, “Mondrian used black and white and the primary colors. He was an obvious one to do so and so was Picasso, in that Picasso is thought of as using simple colors and shapes surrounded by black lines” (quoted in D. Waldman, Roy Lichtenstein, London, 1971, p. 27). By taking up the two “non-colors,” for his composition, Lichtenstein continued an artistic investigation into the effects of monochrome inaugurated by Jan van Eyck’s grisaille Annunciation diptych and explored in the black-and-white paintings of Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Frank Stella. Lichtenstein’s use of black and white was, along with Warhol’s black-and-white paintings, in juxtaposition to the previous generation of New York school painters. “The raw economy (both financial and visual) of the commercial artist’s diagrammatic use of black and white gave an equally new spin to memories of the austere pictorial language used by artists who clung to a faith in abstract art,” Rosenblum notes (in exh. cat., op. cit., 2001, p. 12).
By promoting a humble flower advertisement into a painted subject, Lichtenstein placed Voodoo Lily in the grand lineage of floral still lifes first invented by Caravaggio. While Dutch Golden Age painters like Rachel Ruysch created brilliant paintings of chromatic and compositional exuberance, painting rare, exotic flower arrangements intermingled with other signs of copious luxury consumption, Lichtenstein provides a reversal of the vaunted motif. Rather than taking luxury as his subject, he appropriates the mundane and everyday. By taking a mass-reproduced image and transferring it onto canvas, simulating the mechanical and anonymous style of printing, he shattered the Modernist dogma of originality and the Abstract Expressionist search for the Sublime. “His aim,” the art critic and curator Demetrio Paparoni writes, “was to drain the subject of any kind of emotive implications and to highlight its stereotyped character, thus making the work become the photograph of a society nourished by fake feelings” (“Lichtenstein Grids Silence and Art After Manet” in exh. cat., ibid., 2001, p. 49). Voodoo Lily is one of Lichtenstein’s earliest accomplishments and a foundational example of the burgeoning Pop revolution. Here, Rosenblum, writes, “with his newly minted minimal vocabulary of uninflected black contours, hygienically white surfaces, and Ben-Day dot shading (a preview of pixels), Lichtenstein could take on not only Cezanne but even the recently deceased superstar of the New York art world, Jackson Pollock” (in ibid., p. 26).
With refined technical skill, Lichtenstein brings to bear his newly discovered minimal vocabulary to the vaunted tradition of Western flower painting in Voodoo Lily. The artist first rescaled his source image using a projector, tracing the outline of the image onto his canvas while simultaneously adjusting the composition to account for scaling distortions. The art historian Robert Rosenblum describes Lichtenstein’s technique for this work, writing how, “prompted by the most low-budget, color-free illustrations in seed catalogues, Lichtenstein could make any decorator cringe by painting flowers in printer’s-ink black and white. With his black thumb, he translated the fragile leaves and blooms of his tulips and lilies into coarsely enlarged hatching, and, with equally crude streaks of white, evoked the ephemeral reflections on a tabletop” (“Roy Lichtenstein’s ‘Rhapsody in Black and White’” in ibid., p. 14). The resulting effect was one of “unexpected refinement,” Lichtenstein here reworking his unsophisticated source into a revolutionary new artistic language. Voodoo Lily marks one of the first examples of Lichtenstein elevating an ephemeral mass-produced commercial image into a unique work of art, a hallmark of the new Pop movement and an enduring aspect of Lichtenstein’s mature works. “[Lichtenstein’s] inventiveness is rooted in imitation,” write James Rondeau and Sheena Wagstaff. “He transformed the very idea of borrowing into a profoundly generative, conceptual position, one that alters the trajectory of Modernism, and beyond. His ephemeral sources are reformed as enduring, precious objects. The works on canvas often look convincingly machine-made, but they are entirely dependent on drawn studies and painted by hand. Impersonal in their collective provenance, they are counterintuitively autographic in their finish” (Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective, exh. cat., The Art Institute of Chicago, 2012, p. 20).
Voodoo Lily is an outstanding early example of Lichtenstein’s painterly mimicry of machine-made imagery. His choice to maintain the referent image’s austere monochromatic palette emphasizes the composition’s origin, revealing the vulgar commercial source of his floral motif. In contradistinction to Andy Warhol’s Flowers series begun three years later, where Warhol mechanically warped images of hibiscus flowers published in a magazine to make the flowers appear flattened and distorted, enabling him to reproduce the image in large quantities, Lichtenstein elevated his ubiquitous image into an original painting. The Ben-Day background, inspired by the printing process of comic book and commercial images, is equally essential to his ensuing work. “Dots are a critical thing,” Lichtenstein later described (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 2001, p. 71). The painting witnesses an early appearance of his dot pattern, which Lichtenstein first utilized earlier that year in Look Mickey; they lack the machine precision of his later works, adducing a more handmade quality to the work. The Ben-Day dot pattern was first invented for advertising and comics as a cursory and economic way to print indications of volume—as the background to Voodoo Lily, it achieves a two-plane relationship while emphasizing the linear rather than volumetric aspects of the composition, flattening the floral subject in a similar way to Warhol’s silkscreened Flowers. While in this case, Lichtenstein adds a table ledge to adduce a sense of perspective, in his later black and white single-object paintings he places his subject against a Ben-Day void. Uniform from afar, the background in Voodoo Lily has subtle skips and jumps, with some rows of dots impinging on neighboring forms. These imperfections document Lichtenstein’s earliest exploration of his Ben-Day technique, as he was first experimenting with different brushes and stencils to achieve his desired result. As the art historian Harry Cooper notes, these skips mimic printing errors in comic books and advertising as well: “Lichtenstein was a connoisseur of such imperfections, carefully soliciting the look of poor registration” (“On the Dot” in exh. cat., op. cit., 2012, p. 28).
Lichtenstein valued his black-and-white paintings for both their fidelity to his chosen source images and for their esteemed art historical resonances. As the artist explained, “Mondrian used black and white and the primary colors. He was an obvious one to do so and so was Picasso, in that Picasso is thought of as using simple colors and shapes surrounded by black lines” (quoted in D. Waldman, Roy Lichtenstein, London, 1971, p. 27). By taking up the two “non-colors,” for his composition, Lichtenstein continued an artistic investigation into the effects of monochrome inaugurated by Jan van Eyck’s grisaille Annunciation diptych and explored in the black-and-white paintings of Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Frank Stella. Lichtenstein’s use of black and white was, along with Warhol’s black-and-white paintings, in juxtaposition to the previous generation of New York school painters. “The raw economy (both financial and visual) of the commercial artist’s diagrammatic use of black and white gave an equally new spin to memories of the austere pictorial language used by artists who clung to a faith in abstract art,” Rosenblum notes (in exh. cat., op. cit., 2001, p. 12).
By promoting a humble flower advertisement into a painted subject, Lichtenstein placed Voodoo Lily in the grand lineage of floral still lifes first invented by Caravaggio. While Dutch Golden Age painters like Rachel Ruysch created brilliant paintings of chromatic and compositional exuberance, painting rare, exotic flower arrangements intermingled with other signs of copious luxury consumption, Lichtenstein provides a reversal of the vaunted motif. Rather than taking luxury as his subject, he appropriates the mundane and everyday. By taking a mass-reproduced image and transferring it onto canvas, simulating the mechanical and anonymous style of printing, he shattered the Modernist dogma of originality and the Abstract Expressionist search for the Sublime. “His aim,” the art critic and curator Demetrio Paparoni writes, “was to drain the subject of any kind of emotive implications and to highlight its stereotyped character, thus making the work become the photograph of a society nourished by fake feelings” (“Lichtenstein Grids Silence and Art After Manet” in exh. cat., ibid., 2001, p. 49). Voodoo Lily is one of Lichtenstein’s earliest accomplishments and a foundational example of the burgeoning Pop revolution. Here, Rosenblum, writes, “with his newly minted minimal vocabulary of uninflected black contours, hygienically white surfaces, and Ben-Day dot shading (a preview of pixels), Lichtenstein could take on not only Cezanne but even the recently deceased superstar of the New York art world, Jackson Pollock” (in ibid., p. 26).
