Word: lichtenstein
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Dates: during 1981-1981
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They are also more plainly invented than the works derived from print sources. We do not think of mirror reflections as having a style, and in that sense Lichtenstein's mirror paintings sidle closer to unmediated experience, and so indirectly to nature, than his other work. They also gather poignancy from the fact that they are empty. One gazes at them frontally, as at a real mirror, but nothing shows up in their superficial depths. The spectator is a phantom. These icy, imperturbable tondos and ovals may say more about the nature of Lichtenstein's imagination than anything...
...recent years, Lichtenstein has been preoccupied not merely with parody, but with parodies of parody-paintings based on the cartoonist's view of modern art. There was once a "pop" view of surrealism, loosely derived from Dali and Arp and epitomized in the 1940s in such verses...
This is the caricature of surrealist kitsch that Lichtenstein invokes in paintings like Reclining Nude, 1977: one figure sporting Swiss-cheese holes à la Henry Moore, another in a stiff suit like a Magritte businessman, a Kandinsky-style squiggle here, an Arpish wiggle there...
...parodying the most recognizable traits of textbook modernism as reflected by its satirists, Lichtenstein may certainly be said to display a post-modernist sensibility; but what else is going on? Not, it appears, very much, and to call these paintings "visionary," as Cowart does, is to overrate them. Rather, they are grounded on a somewhat smug familiarity with the power of cliche. That, of course, is one dilemma of art education...
...effect, Lichtenstein's show invites us to have the cake and eat it too-to see his work as part of a "heroic" historical continuum while deriding the cliches to which that continuum has been worn down. But this cannot divert the suspicion that, for all his manifest abilities as wit and designer, his art has become repetitious. -By Robert Hughes