\u201cWhat do you think about Roy Lichtenstein?\u201d<\/p>\n
In early 2020 a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art posed that question to the artist Alex Da Corte<\/a>, whose vibrant work spans video, performance, painting and installations.<\/p>\n The question was hardly a casual one: The Whitney was exploring who might curate a retrospective of Lichtenstein, who died in 1997<\/a>. Though his hand-painted reproductions of 1950s and \u201860s comic books and advertisements are seen everywhere \u2014 T-shirts and postage stamps<\/a> as often as museum walls \u2014 Lichtenstein\u2019s last New York retrospective was some 33 years ago. Would audiences today get how topical and funny and new he was back then \u2014 and how much of his thinking endures in contemporary culture?<\/p>\n \u201cOf course I was aware of Roy\u2019s work, it was everywhere in the world,\u201d Da Corte, 46, said in an interview from his north Philadelphia studio. \u201cBut I had never thought about it in a close way.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI thought, how curious that an artist\u2019s work could be so ubiquitous, and yet I don\u2019t see it,\u201d he said. \u201cSo, for me, it felt urgent to ask, as an artist, how would I want my work to be considered and reconsidered when everyone thinks they know everything about it?\u201d<\/p>\n In 2018, the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation had gifted 400 works by the artist \u2014 about half its holdings \u2014 to the Whitney<\/a>, and in 2022, Dorothy Lichtenstein<\/a>, the artist\u2019s widow, donated their former Greenwich Village house and studio<\/a>, which has become the new home of the Whitney Independent Study Program. A major show, drawing upon this largess, seemed logical.<\/p>\n The result is \u201cRoy Lichtenstein: Like New.\u201d Opening on Oct. 11, it brings together a vast swath of work by this key figure of Pop Art, including painting, drawing, collage, prints, photographs, sculpture and even a three-channel film, all made between the early 1940s and mid-1990s.<\/p>\n From the start, the challenge for the Whitney was how to mount a show of such a familiar \u2014 perhaps too familiar \u2014 artist that would resonate today.<\/p>\n \u201cI remember Dorothy saying, \u2018You don\u2019t need to make this a traditional retrospective. In fact, it would probably be better if it wasn\u2019t,\u2019\u201d said David Breslin, who initiated the conversation with Da Corte before moving to the Metropolitan Museum of Art as curator of modern and contemporary art.<\/p>\n The Museums Special Section<\/p>\n Da Corte\u2019s own post-Pop sculptural installations and videos<\/a> draw upon 20th-century American art history and sometimes involve playing the roles of the artists he engages, whether Marcel Duchamp or Eminem. He embarked on a deep dive into everything Lichtenstein, teaming up with a Whitney curator, Meg Onli, 42, an organizer of the 2024 Whitney Biennial whose past exhibitions have focused largely on the Black experience, with a special interest in new media.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat? I\u2019m not the first person you think of when you think of Roy Lichtenstein?\u201d Onli joked during the joint interview.<\/p>\n Beyond Pop<\/p>\n But they hope their perspectives will offer up new readings of Lichtenstein\u2019s oeuvre. While including some of Lichtenstein\u2019s most recognizable paintings, such as \u201cGirl With Ball\u201d<\/a> (1961) and \u201cDrowning Girl\u201d<\/a> (1963), the show moves away from a narrow view of his status as a Pop artist best known for recontextualizing mass media imagery and translating cheap, industrial printing processes (all those Ben-Day dots!) into high-art canvases.<\/p>\n Instead, Da Corte and Onli offer up a picture of how he was equally inspired by more conceptual approaches, including Fluxus, a Sixties anti-art movement that favored D.I.Y. techniques, using cheap and reusable materials to create spontaneous art.<\/p>\n In his research, Da Corte was particularly fascinated by Lichtenstein\u2019s interviews with other artists and curators. \u201cSeeing Roy\u2019s words, and the ways in which he described his work, it was so conceptual,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Lichtenstein, it turned out, was a peer of Allan Kaprow, who coined the term \u201chappenings,\u201d<\/a> and he himself was a participant in one of them in 1963. \u201cThey taught at Rutgers together, and Roy hung out with the Fluxus crowd,\u201d Da Corte said. \u201cI thought, what if the framework of Pop has actually been a limiting device when it comes to understanding his work?\u201d<\/p>\n The curators also trace a complicated back-and-forth between Lichtenstein and a number of postmodern appropriation artists (the so-called Pictures Generation of the 1970s and 80s) who regularly represented existing artworks as their own in order to challenge ideas of originality, copying and authorship.<\/p>\n Lichtenstein was appropriating imagery and being appropriated right from the earliest moments of his career, said Onli, citing artists whose works hang side by side with his own paintings. Elaine Sturtevant, for example, \u201cwas copying Lichtenstein\u2019s work as soon as he was making it, and Lichtenstein was giving her stencils to work with. And Lichtenstein ends up copying his own work, too.\u201d<\/p>\n The exhibition will include a reconstruction of Lichtenstein\u2019s 1962 debut exhibition at Castelli Gallery \u2014 the first time that landmark show has been rehung in its entirety, right down to the parquet floor and lighting that mimics the original fixtures. \u201cIt was quite hard to track down all the paintings, including one of my favorites, \u2018Laughing Cat,\u2019<\/a> originally owned by Andy Warhol,\u201d Onli said.<\/p>\n An introductory room in the show will highlight Flash Lab, an experimental studio set up by Hoyt Sherman, a professor at Ohio State University where Lichtenstein was a student in the 1940s. At the Flash Lab, students would stand in a darkened room; a burst of light would appear, illuminating a still life arrangement for moments. The students would then be asked to render the image from memory \u2014 turning themselves into human cameras, in a way.<\/p>\n Lichtenstein, in interviews throughout his life, attributed his ideas about visual perception and his conceptual bent to Sherman.<\/p>\n Curator as Performer<\/p>\n Some of Lichtenstein\u2019s most celebrated war-themed paintings in the show, borrowing from the DC Comics series \u201cAll-American Men of War\u201d \u2014 \u201cVaroom!\u201d (1963) and \u201cAs I Opened Fire\u201d (1964) \u2014 recall Flash Lab\u2019s explosions of light, which Sherman developed not only to train artists but to condition fighter pilots. One gallery will incorporate a new video by Da Corte in which he plays Hoyt Sherman (his eight-hour transformation process involved prosthetic makeup).<\/p>\n \u201cWe felt it would be a generous way to start the show, to get into Lichtenstein\u2019s sort of psychedelic mind space before you go through his whole life of pictures,\u201d Da Corte said.<\/p>\n It was Onli who urged Da Corte to make the video. \u201cThere\u2019s an interesting position that Alex gets to take as an artist-curator,\u201d she said. \u201cWhy not take advantage of that?\u201d<\/p>\n Da Corte\u2019s artistic perspective comes into play in other parts of the show as well \u2014 including the recreation of important, temporary murals that Lichtenstein created at different points in his career. Da Corte pointed out the replica he and his studio assistants were making of Lichtenstein\u2019s \u201cGirl in Window\u201d (1963), originally installed at the New York World\u2019s Fair. The process of remaking the piece \u2014 consisting of acrylic on 10 plywood panels that together measure 20 feet by 16 feet \u2014 allowed Da Corte to understand Lichtenstein at a deeper level, he said. \u201cI had to work in ways that were out of step with the stylistic choices that I would typically make, with the colors that I would typically use,\u201d said Da Corte. \u201cIt put me in the space of historian or the archivist.\u201d<\/p>\n It also underscored the handmade nature of Lichtenstein\u2019s work, no matter the scale at which he was working. \u201cThe way that he painted the dots, they\u2019re raised like Braille,\u201d said Da Corte. \u201cYou begin to understand that this is a person who\u2019s deeply engaged with touch, and with making things by hand, even as he lives in a space full of icons and symbols.\u201d<\/p>\n Onli points out that Lichtenstein\u2019s embrace of ephemerality as an aesthetic value is an important counterpoint to his current status as a blue-chip artist. (In a time of declining values, Lichtenstein\u2019s auction prices have soared in the past two years<\/a>.) \u201cLichtenstein was interested in impermanence. He was totally open to this work being destroyed.\u201d<\/p>\n