Lichtenstein and the sow8217;s ear

I pressed the fire control... and ahead of me rockets blazed through the sky... -- Whaam! 1963Early in the sixties, a silent revolution s...

I pressed the fire control8230; and ahead of me rockets blazed through the sky8230; 8212; Whaam! 1963

Early in the sixties, a silent revolution swept the art departments of DC Comics. Take any Batman cover from before 1963 and compare it with one from after that watershed year. Everything will look different, as if the artist8217;s perception had moved to another plane. There will be new perspectives that the human eye is not designed to accommodate, a new, disturbing way of using chiaroscuro, an attention to visual detail never seen before in commercial pencil or ink. Batman creator Bob Kane took one look at it, decided he didn8217;t belong in comics any more and went into retirement.

Strangely enough, the revolution started where no self-respecting commercial artist would care to be seen 8212; a nice little art gallery in New York. On show was Roy Lichtenstein8217;s Whaam! More than Look Mickey, his first experimental canvas, it was Whaam!, a frame lifted straight from out of a trashy war comic, that defined his real manifesto: to change the way we see. It showed that Lichtenstein did not always need Mickey, Donald and mushy women for props. His art did not always need to be good, clean fun, as Andy Warhol8217;s always needed to be disturbing. He could also find art in the situation of a fighter pilot making a kill.

Formally Lichtenstein, who died on Monday, had always said that his innovation was a reaction to the laughably serious abstract expressionism of the Jackson Pollock era. In reality, though, he was a failed abstract expressionist himself. Out in the cold, with no reputation to lose, he started reproducing commercial art on a grand scale, complete with the Ben Day spots of the halftone printing process. Across the Atlantic, Warhol was giving the critics the finger with Campbell8217;s soup. In New York, Lichtenstein was giving them the treatment with Kiss II and Whaam!The treatment froze off the community. A year later, Life magazine wondered if Lichtenstein was the worst artist in America. The New York Times called him an artist who quot;briskly went about making a sow8217;s ear out of a sow8217;s earquot;. But all the while, the buyers were voting with their chequebooks. Even today, he remains one of the most lucrative options for auctioneers. Earlier this year, Christie8217;s sold Blang for 2.9 million. In 1991, a lot with a floor price of 350,000 brought in half a million.

Fairly early, therefore, the art industry was forced to rehabilitate Lichtenstein. In 1968, the Tate devoted a whole show to him, its first for a living artist. The next year, he was at the Guggenheim, and later at the MOMA. This summer, when his health was failing, he was still on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

By that time he was rehabilitated, of course, boredom had set in. Lichtenstein had shown that anything could be turned into pop art, so long as it had halftone dots in it. If you8217;d seen one mainstream Lichtenstein, you8217;d seen them all. Why, then, will he remain collectible long after his death?

Because he has successfully executed his manifesto: he has changed the way we see 8212; and dream. The camera angles in Speed are vintage Lichtenstein. So are the manipulated perspectives in a music video. Sow8217;s ears or not, they are art.

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It8217;s odd, the level to which the creative media have been infiltrated, considering that only a minority is familiar with Lichtenstein8217;s work. It happened because the medium that was his first inspiration was also the first to appropriate his methods. Generations of children have grown up on comics that are pure pop art. Bob Kane lives on, and his images are history. Roy Lichtenstein died this week, but his work will live forever in the collective imagination.