Word: lichtenstein
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Aesthetic sense demands ironic distance, be it geographic or in time, because what is unconsciously accepted is often also what is most beautiful. This is not a sociological justification of Lichtenstein; although his blow up paintings of comic-book panels, sandwiches and soda-pop, is as lucid and incisive a reflection of American life as any contemporary art. And portrayal of the culture of its origin remains a justification of art. But Lichtenstein's work stands up on its own in purely sensual terms, and also in formal aesthetic terms...
...LICHTENSTEIN attacks the very distinction between illusion and reality, symbol and representation. Even though we know that the comic-book characters in his paintings are charicatures, the sentiments depicted by the disembodied panels are so overwhelming that we cannot help but participate in the drama. Even though we know that the painting of a sandwich and soda pop is schematic and does not even attempt traditional modelling and shading, our first reaction that it does represent the object is so powerful and so instantaneous that it almost actually becomes the subject...
...trio with a second movement labeled TSIAJ, for "The Scherzo is a Joke"--the joke was on neither the popular tunes nor the stringent lyricism, but on the pedants who'd have liked to keep them separate. When Ives was joking, his music could be something like a Roy Lichtenstein painting of a comic book frame, mocking people's belief that 'art' should be separate from 'life,' off somewhere in a museum; and when Ives was serious the hymns could come from the stringency as naturally as Bach's last Goldberg Variation could turn out to be a quodlibet...
...today shall say he was not right? By 1965 pop had become the most popular movement in American art history, drenched in ballyhoo, gratefully supported by legions of collectors whose appetites bore the same relation to connoisseurship that TV dinners do to poulet en demi-deuil. Warhol, Lichtenstein, Indiana, Rosenquist, Wesselmann, Oldenburg, Johns and Rauschenberg became instant household names, not counting their swarm of epigones. "What we have with the pop artists," wrote the English critic Lawrence Alloway, "is a situation in which success has been combined with misunderstanding." He had coined the term pop art, in England...
Johns and Rauschenberg, then, and Oldenburg, and some Warhol, a good deal of Lichtenstein and a few pieces by Rosenquist and (surprisingly enough, in view of his calamitous recent work) by Jim Dine: such are the survivors. The losers are more numerous...