Lichtenstein's Theft and the Artists Left Behind

Same thing happened to me with Picasso and with Van Gogh. Hated the stuff, then couldn’t get enough.

Makes an argument for widely distributed exhibts of high quality forgeries, er, copies.

I think that there is very little that doesn’t have some influence from somewhere. every great artist is inspired by what they’ve encountered, and builds on techniques they’ve learned and emulated, which often included other art. i think it often comes down to degree, intent, and what of value the new artist brings to the subject.

many artists have played off of the famous mona lisa precisely because it is is famous and inspiring.

wholesale copying is usually frowned upon, so it often comes down to, did the new artist bring something of their own to the composition, or make it their own somehow?

With Lichtenstein I’d say yes he did even though it isn’t my cup of tea, with Glen Brown I’d say no.

Attribution is important in the art world, it is a way to acknowledge those that inspired a certain piece and the right thing to do if you are building off of another’s art. that is my 2 cents anyway for whatever they are worth.

My particular art interests tend to run more to what I in my own mind call “classical” modern art - Picasso, Mondrian, Klee, Matisse - .not so much the Impressionists though having just visited Monet’s home Giverny and seen some of the great Impressionist works in Paris, I like it more than I used to. Anyhow, because I like to hang out in modern art museums, I have seen my fair share of Pop art. I try to have an appreciation for all art that I view even if it’s not my bag.

I thought that copying, appropriating images was what Pop artists were all about. Am I wrong? Jasper Johns, whose work I love - not sure if they consider him a Pop artist (? - I wikipediaed it and apparently he prefers to be called a neo-dadaist but there is an overalp), pretty much a straight up copy of the actual flag. Warhol, as many have said above, copied the Campbell’s soup labels, and Lichtenstein was doing the same with comic books.

I think that there is a process of selection involved. Normally one does not just read one panel of a comic book. He was selecting one out, magnifying it, focusing you on the composition. I never really thought the message was so deep in Pop art myself, which is why I never much gravitated to it. However, I think if you are angry about how he copied other artists that he would probably consider that part of the point - all the Pop artists seemed to want to create noise around their work. I’m not sure even that they cared that much about the art itself so much as the attention and outrage they could create.

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this narrative would make sense if 1) Lichtenstein made money in the first few years (he didn’t so he was making these for love/devotion) and 2) he had no respect for his source medium (“look how lame this stuff is” is putting words in his mouth, and a pretty revealing attitude) and 3) his style never changed. He kept working with a stylized comic-based works, but after < 10 years moved into working with landscapes, still-lives, reflections, the abstract representation of painting (a weird, wonderful take on abstract expressionism, broad brush-stroked themselves rendered abstract via his own enlargement of the comics medium) etc.

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Good to have the added facts to supplement my meagre knowledge. I don’t know that copying panels without a lot of remuneration is proof of love or devotion, though.

As to your apparent unhappiness with my use of quotation marks, I have to plead that the language doesn’t give us a different typographical way to show that I am summarizing an attitude based on my observations, so I did what people normally do in conversations. I stand by my interpretation: he not only copied poorly (in a slavish way, not unlike what a child would do in trying to copy a piece of work, trying to put every cross-hatch in place while missing the shape of the objects), he lettered terribly and couldn’t even give proper attention to the dots that mattered as much or more than the rest, and he substituted (often) new dialog that was more cliché, and made the art look stupider and lamer.

I’m aware of his brush strokes, which, again, are amusing for a little while but turn into just another shtick.

My ultimate dissatisfaction is that he simply pulled images out of comics and copied them poorly. Or perhaps idiomatically, but not well. I was impressed the first times I saw this, but he did it so often (despite the fact that it was less than a decade), it got old and I began to see more and more to dislike in it. Why couldn’t he think of his own material? It’s like a brief conversation I had with a programmer at a classical radio station, asking why he didn’t play more Claude Bolling. He said he liked the first thing he heard by him, but when he heard more, he thought it was a repetitive trick. It was only later that I realized he continued to program Jacques Loussier, who made a career of doing jazz versions of Bach and other classical composers. I’d have said Loussier was the one-trick ponly, while Bolling at least came up with his own tunes and forms and homages to different idiomatic instrument sounds.

My interest in Pop Art has waned considerably over the years. Warhol’s art never did that much for me, but I still chuckle at the work of PR art that his life became, cynically winking as he pocketed the cash for work he mostly just signed. He was open about it, and I think his shallowness was real. He painted the soup cans because he ate soup every day of his life, and that’s as deep as it got with him. The one Pop artist I still enjoy is Jess, particularly his word-salad collages, and primarily TRICKY CAD. I suppose if I were consistent in my principles, I should renounce his evil works, but he didn’t make a mystery of where he got his material, and he created something otherworldly from it. When he learned that Gould didn’t like what he was doing, he stopped, which I kind of regret.

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You make the assumption that he wanted to be appreciated but here is what he said:

From: Pop Art

His comic strip images had an initial shock value, but like much of Pop they were quickly embraced by the galleries and collectors. Lichtenstein remarked, “It was hard to get a painting that was despicable enough so that no one would hang it…everybody was hanging everything. It was almost acceptable to hang a dripping paint rag, everybody was accustomed to this. The one thing everyone hated was commercial art; apparently they didn’t hate that enough, either.”

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I did mention that the soup can was artistic in many ways (industrial design, graphic design, etc.) but still the end result was an object and one could argue that Warhol was therefore justified in observing it by reproducing it and hanging it in a frame. The soup can is an object that contains content, while the comic book panel is purely content. If Lichtenstein painted comic books (including staples, torn pages, and faded covers) then we’d be having a different conversation. It would be weird but it would make more sense (and arguably would not be plagiarism).

Here’s a f’rinstance – if I re-painted someone else’s painting, changed a couple little things, streamlined some of the draftsmanship but largely kept it the same, then claimed credit for it without crediting the original artist as the inspiration/object of observation, would that be OK? Would people defend it as being about the painting rather than a copy of the painting? If not, then why is it OK to do so with a comic book artist?

Also, if you really want to award 100% of the value and observable content of the soup can to the label designer, I can cede that point, and in that case Warhol ripped him off just like Lichtenstein ripped off comics artists. Great! Two plagiarists. :smile:

I guess that is the point, but it’s my point: Lichtenstein took advantage of the fact that comics was a marginalized art form and that comics artists worked in relative obscurity and anonymity. Are artists only protected from uncredited plagiarism if their art forms are considered “legit” by the mainstream?

If the Pop movement (via Lichtenstein) truly recognized capital “A” art in a non-traditional source like comics, then why didn’t he just draw a comic book?

I forgot to mention earlier that your point about Lichtenstein’s misuse of the Benday dots pattern is SPOT ON (pun intended!). It’s less damaging than the plagiarism, but it’s still something that Lichtenstein could have made a legitimate comment on if he had had the skill; the cheap four-color print process added a weird, accidental, mechanical note of additional content to comic books that none of the artists intended. The beauty was in its overlapping dots and off registration that made for strange ghost images when you looked at them up close. It’s kind of amazing, but Lichtenstein missed the point.

And that vocabulary is so pervasive today – bad graphic designers continue to misuse it. It’s like a badly done reference to something they’ve never even seen because they’ve only seen Lichtenstein’s version of it.

Check out the 4CP blog for really awesome ongoing discussion about “The dots!” http://4cp.posthaven.com/

Hi kids, welcome to art school 101. Look up recontextualisation. The audience was equally shocked and dismissive when Duchamp started presenting his ready-mades in galleries. Today he is considered a giant of contemporary art at the time.

It is difficult to understand why some everyday objects and images break through and become world-famous artworks. @Mister44’s explanation is the most accurate: these works, like all works, are products of their era. When that era is no more, it’s hard to understand how things of the time came to be so popular.

Furthermore, like is the case for most artists, the popular consciousness simplifies an artist’s entire career of art to just one period of their art making lives. Lichtenstein was an exhibited artist before using the art of DC Comics.

Australia’s national gallery has one of these guys as well as his more recognisable works. I personally love this artwork far more than the comics stuff, but it’s important to understand that the artist’s work was a commentary and consideration of commercial art (i.e. what now classifies as ‘graphic design’) and comics are also commercial art.

ORLY? If you cared enough to even read the Wikipedia page on him you’d know that this was his first foray into using comics as art:

Inspired by this interaction with his son:

Mickey Mouse is so obscure, amirite?

And that vocabulary is so pervasive today – bad graphic designers continue to misuse it.

I hate when people misuse things that don’t understand!

Benday dots

I imagine the estate of Van Gogh is pissed about this one, right?

No just an appreciation of the fact that it’s an appropriation of the original.

The “I could have done that” is always strong when it comes to Lichtenstein :smile:

Everything is a remix. Those comic panels borrow heavily from a history of visual story-telling devices and cliches. There is no such thing as an original idea. All ideas come from what we already know.

I don’t see anyone in this very reasonable thread misunderstanding what recontextualization is – we’re arguing that, on a scale, the panel(s) in question don’t fall into that category.

The only point I’ve seen that even comes close to giving him a pass here is that the panel was divorced from the context of the page and story it was in originally. But to what degree does that minor change recontextualize the image? To me that’s like taking a song out of its album, or an aria out of its opera. Again, apply this scenario to ANY other art form and it doesn’t hold water. If you take a chapter from a novel and publish it as a short story with the names of the characters changed, has it been recontextualized or plagiarized?

Reproducing a piece of static 2D visual art as another piece of static 2D visual art doesn’t seem very transformative. Sure, a painting of a stove is transformative because the painting is not a stove. But no one would argue that making an identical stove would fall in the same category.

How does this comment come immediately after you jab at Lichtenstein for remixing Van Gogh?

Did the winds change suddenly, or a I not understanding some esoteric concept wherein you change directions every post?

First he’s appropriating (“bad!”) then he’s remixing (“good!”).

And “you could have done it.”

Yes, and you could have invented the wheel, too. Any schoolchild could have.

Once you’ve seen it, it’s obvious.

As soon as you put an object in a gallery it has been recontextualised, whether you like it or not.

Pray tell, discussion club, how many people here have tertiary qualifications on the subject?

@JessePost Re your last comment because this discussion is now closed:

Obviously these works exist on a spectrum between those poles (thus the arguments).

The point I am making is that I’d contend you’d find few gallery curators or art school graduates who would see this as plagiarism. It seems to me like it’s comics fans who are most upset by this. When it comes to decisions on a topic I lean towards the professionals in that field.

And it’s immediately obvious that Lichtenstein was “permitted” to tip the scales towards plagiarism because “who cares about comics? They’re just meaningless pop culture artifacts.”

No one permits anything to happen in art. Artists mostly think “who cares about ______” IMO. The world is our canvas and palette.

I’m saying, “Reimagine those comics as meaningFUL art objects, take another look at what happened, and see if you feel the same way.”

No one is denying they are valuable art in their own right, but a panel of a comic is more like a note in a song than a whole song. Do you accept musical remixes or sampling as a genuine form of art? Does that use of a tiny portion of another whole work constitute plagiarism? The music world doesn’t seem to think so, even if their shitty record labels do. Again: I’ll side with artists here.

My final question is: why did the original comic artists not put their own blown-up panels on canvas and make this same art? Is it because they, too, saw their art as existing squarely in the commercial realm and not part of the elitist fine art world?

Allow me to introduce you to Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote (pdf).

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Dude… what are you smoking?

It was a joke. I was supporting your argument.

I not only understand that but I support it. And if comics weren’t marginalized as something no more valuable than a urinal then Roy could have just hung up Russ Heath’s original panel and done the same trick. Actually, he could have anyway and I would think he was a hero of the comics art form.

Again, not arguing that recontextualization does not exist. I’m arguing that plagiarism also exists. Obviously these works exist on a spectrum between those poles (thus the arguments).

And it’s immediately obvious that Lichtenstein was “permitted” to tip the scales towards plagiarism because “who cares about comics? They’re just meaningless pop culture artifacts.” I’m saying, “Reimagine those comics as meaningFUL art objects, take another look at what happened, and see if you feel the same way.”

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