Roy Lichtenstein: Meditations on Art
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Individual Artists
Roy Lichtenstein: Meditations on Art Details
About the Author Gianni Mercurio is a curator and writer. He has curated numerous exhibitions and their catalogues including: The Keith Haring Show (2005) and The Andy Warhol Show (2004). Robert Pincus Witten is an art gallery director, critic, and modernist art historian. Frederic Tuten is an American novelist, short story writer and essayist. Annabelle Ténèze is curator at the Musée national Picasso, in Paris. Read more
Reviews
This hefty volume is the catalogue for an exhibition held in early 2010 in Milan, Italy, which later went to Cologne in Germany. There are some very interesting essays in this book, such has the one tackling the issue of the original versus the copy in Lichtenstein's art (at a time when artists had reached a kind of dead-end with abstraction, Lichtenstein's answer was "repainting in all the possible senses of the word"), as well as a very informed study of the artist's themes and technique by art historian Robert Pincus Witten, a first-hand witness of Lichtenstein's rise in the NYC artworld of the early 1960's, who quotes the painter on the different types of dots - the famous benday dots : "Not only the size of the dots help date the early works but the angle of the dots too...Earlier, this angle was more acute, approximately a 45 degree angle".Now the main asset of this book is undoubtedly the top-quality illustrations, from photographs of the artist at work at various stages of his career, to color plates of the works themselves, some coming out as real surprises, such as the early works from the 1950's which hark back to Picasso or Larry Rivers. The only drawback is that most of the works in the show are from the 1970's onwards; there is no 1964 Girl painting for example, probably because of the rising insurance value of those works, and, therefore, it is an incomplete retrospective ,but it still remains a valuable addition to the literature on the artist.