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拍品专文
Painted in 1986, Roy Lichtenstein’s Blonde is a spectacle of explosive color and form, one which perfectly encapsulates the artist’s career-spanning exploration and interrogation of the history of painting. Blonde is an eruption of some of Lichtenstein’s most iconic techniques: bold lines, Ben-day dots, and expressionist brushstrokes. But the present work is not only a summation of mastered techniques, but it is a nod to key artistic movements such as Abstract Expressionism, Surrealism and Pop, and a layering of these varying aesthetic tendencies that not only defined his practice, but defined popular culture. Bright yellow brushstrokes juxtaposed by the signature Ben-day dots and earthy abstract forms, these elements amalgamate into a vibrant chaos that upon closer examination, reveals itself to be a methodic and controlled spontaneity.
From the Brushstroke Faces series, Blonde is a critical example of the artist’s career-long investigation of the brushstroke. Early on he began to explore and deconstruct the motif—what is, essentially, the building block of Western painting. Brushstrokes are conventionally conceived as vehicles of expression, but Lichtenstein made them into a subject of equal importance to his unnamed female muses, who stand as central protagonists to his diverse oeuvre. Modern artists have typically maintained that the subject of a painting is painting itself and Lichtenstein took this idea one imaginative step further turning it into a compositional element that could serve as a key subject matter of a work. His brushstroke is at once a playful yet serious exploration of key themes in art history: high culture and low art; abstraction and representation; and, of course, the artist’s ironic nod to the slashing painterly gesture so central to the style of the Abstract Expressionist painters.
From the early stages of his career, Lichtenstein was openly comparative of his work in relation to Abstract Expressionism. Abstract Expressionism was more “ground-directedness,” in his eyes. “You put something down, react to it, put something else down, and the painting itself becomes a symbol of this.” (Roy Lichtenstein in What is Pop Art? Interviews with eight painters, G. R. Swenson, Art News 67, November 1963, pp. 25-27). While Lichtenstein was also quick to identify the tendencies of Pop Art as more object-oriented, in comparison, he always admitted to the undeniable ties between his work and the New York Abstractionists. “There is humor here. The work is still ground-directed; the fact that it’s an eyebrow or an almost direct copy of something is unimportant. The ground-directedness is in the painter’s mind and not immediately apparent in the painting.” (Roy Lichtenstein in What is Pop Art? Interviews with eight painters, G. R. Swenson, Art News 67, November 1963, pp. 25-27). In a counter-critical way, Blonde, executed at a pivotal moment in the artist’s trail-blazing career, expresses the artist’s central belief that, despite the elements of popular culture it might refer to, his work is just as much a technical examination of abstract elements through the application of paint. Blonde is just as much an homage to the pioneering schools of Modern Art, but a testament to the technical mastery of applying paint on canvas.
Roy Lichtenstein tackled head-on conventional notions of taste and quality. What was typically disparaged as trivial, he elevated to a classical and mythical status. “To all of [Lichtenstein’s] images there was…a particular and unmistakably American quality: a lean, laconic scrutiny of the world that separated his art even from the paintings of Europeans of his generation, like Richard Hamilton and Sigmar Polke, who also borrowed from pop culture sources” (M. Kimmelman, “Roy Lichtenstein, Pop Master, Dies at 73,”, The New York Times, September 30, 1997).
Blonde reminds us of Lichtenstein’s uncanny ability to eradicate the harsh divisions between abstraction and representation to create a celebratory composition that honors multiple artistic movements. Equally so, Blonde also reminds us of Lichtenstein’s fundamental belief in the critical investigation of the painted surface, aside from any popular culture or art historical references. Dorothy Lichtenstein once said this of her husband, “Roy viewed all of his paintings as abstract lines and marks on canvas, no matter what they looked like.” (Dorothy Lichtenstein in exhibition catalogue, Lichtenstein: Modern Painting by Dave Hickey, New York: Richard Gray Gallery, 2010, p. 5).
From the Brushstroke Faces series, Blonde is a critical example of the artist’s career-long investigation of the brushstroke. Early on he began to explore and deconstruct the motif—what is, essentially, the building block of Western painting. Brushstrokes are conventionally conceived as vehicles of expression, but Lichtenstein made them into a subject of equal importance to his unnamed female muses, who stand as central protagonists to his diverse oeuvre. Modern artists have typically maintained that the subject of a painting is painting itself and Lichtenstein took this idea one imaginative step further turning it into a compositional element that could serve as a key subject matter of a work. His brushstroke is at once a playful yet serious exploration of key themes in art history: high culture and low art; abstraction and representation; and, of course, the artist’s ironic nod to the slashing painterly gesture so central to the style of the Abstract Expressionist painters.
From the early stages of his career, Lichtenstein was openly comparative of his work in relation to Abstract Expressionism. Abstract Expressionism was more “ground-directedness,” in his eyes. “You put something down, react to it, put something else down, and the painting itself becomes a symbol of this.” (Roy Lichtenstein in What is Pop Art? Interviews with eight painters, G. R. Swenson, Art News 67, November 1963, pp. 25-27). While Lichtenstein was also quick to identify the tendencies of Pop Art as more object-oriented, in comparison, he always admitted to the undeniable ties between his work and the New York Abstractionists. “There is humor here. The work is still ground-directed; the fact that it’s an eyebrow or an almost direct copy of something is unimportant. The ground-directedness is in the painter’s mind and not immediately apparent in the painting.” (Roy Lichtenstein in What is Pop Art? Interviews with eight painters, G. R. Swenson, Art News 67, November 1963, pp. 25-27). In a counter-critical way, Blonde, executed at a pivotal moment in the artist’s trail-blazing career, expresses the artist’s central belief that, despite the elements of popular culture it might refer to, his work is just as much a technical examination of abstract elements through the application of paint. Blonde is just as much an homage to the pioneering schools of Modern Art, but a testament to the technical mastery of applying paint on canvas.
Roy Lichtenstein tackled head-on conventional notions of taste and quality. What was typically disparaged as trivial, he elevated to a classical and mythical status. “To all of [Lichtenstein’s] images there was…a particular and unmistakably American quality: a lean, laconic scrutiny of the world that separated his art even from the paintings of Europeans of his generation, like Richard Hamilton and Sigmar Polke, who also borrowed from pop culture sources” (M. Kimmelman, “Roy Lichtenstein, Pop Master, Dies at 73,”, The New York Times, September 30, 1997).
Blonde reminds us of Lichtenstein’s uncanny ability to eradicate the harsh divisions between abstraction and representation to create a celebratory composition that honors multiple artistic movements. Equally so, Blonde also reminds us of Lichtenstein’s fundamental belief in the critical investigation of the painted surface, aside from any popular culture or art historical references. Dorothy Lichtenstein once said this of her husband, “Roy viewed all of his paintings as abstract lines and marks on canvas, no matter what they looked like.” (Dorothy Lichtenstein in exhibition catalogue, Lichtenstein: Modern Painting by Dave Hickey, New York: Richard Gray Gallery, 2010, p. 5).