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| ROY LICHTENSTEIN |
Roy Lichtenstein was born in New York where he later studied at the Art Students' League. After his military service in Europe he completed his studies at Ohio State University, Columbus in 1949 where he then became a professor until 1951 when he had his first one-man exhibition at the Carlebach Gallery, New York. During the 1950s, he worked as a commercial artist and designer and did display work for shop windows. His paintings and drawings at this time were parodies of American '20s art. During the late '50s and very early '60s his work passed through a non-representational, Abstract-Expressionist phase, but Lichtenstein is most associated with the 1960s Pop Art movement, where "the medium is the message." Pop Art carries a strong social message and is a comment involving the depersonalization of the mass media aspect in our environment. Its aesthetic sensibility is brash and harsh. Pop Art painting is generally flat and deals almost exclusively in second hand images, pictures of pictures. In his paintings and silkscreen of magnified brush swipes, Lichtenstein appropriates the pre-pop Abstract-Expressionistic gestural stroke as the subject of his compositions. Painting in Gold Frame is a comment on great works of art, a novelty of American merchandising. This lithograph belongs to his "Painting" series which presents Lichtenstein's discourse on art about art, "prints about paintings of paintings." This work is a cool and sharp rendering of close-up reality. The references to comic strip illustration and commercial art is highly noticeable. Traditionally, this is a rather large work for paper; a work of this size would usually be a painting. But Lichtenstein titled his piece Painting in Gold Frame when in fact it is only a print of a painting. Here we have the deliberate confusion between title and reality. |
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 PANNELL ART GALLERY
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