I get confused, though. So Liechtenstein and Public Enemy are okay?
How about Glenn Brown?
What about Shephard Fairey? (not specifically concerned about the Obama thing, more the other things he’s swiped)
http://www.art-for-a-change.com/Obey/index.htm
How about Todd Goldman?
All just seems like exploiting other people’s work to me.
Do you really not see a difference - qualitatively and quantitatively - between Roy Lictenstein and TODD GOLDMAN? Honestly?
Whaam is based on a panel by Irv Novick, not Russ Heath.
One or more other Lichtenstein’s are based on Heath IIRC.
Question: two of these examples did Lichtenstein claim that his design came from the nowehere of his own genius, or did he up-front claim that it was taken from other sources? Unlike Fairey and Goldman who flat-out lied.
Regarding the first, I think I covered that pretty well already.
If I’d found myself in Russ Heath’s position, I’d have painted some canvases of my art in the style of Lichtenstein, and sold them to art museums. I wonder if he tried that?
I think we’ll just have to agree to disagree here. You know more about art than I do, so maybe the idea of appropriation actually being important to the work makes sense to you, but it doesn’t to me. It just diminishes it. I don’t put much truck in stuff being ‘transformative’.
I think both Lichtenstein and Brown’s work would make exactly the same point they claim it does if they hadn’t short-circuited the creative process by lifting from other people’s original compositions, and personally, I’d appreciate them more. I liked Lichtenstein until I learned about where his work comes from. I don’t see why the idea of juxtaposing ‘low art’ comic book images with ‘high art’ paintings couldn’t have been made without lifting other people’s work, and I don’t understand why Brown couldn’t come up with his own damn spaceships. The fact that they chose not to makes me think they decided to skip the difficult part.
But like I say, I’m probably ignorant and wrong.
The true crime is art itself.
Did Russ Heath ever try selling oversized paintings of comic panels as fine art? Unless that’s the case I’m not sure Lichtenstein really “stole” anything from him, at least no more than Andy Warhol stole from the label designers at Campbell’s Soup or than Duchamp stole from whoever created those porcelain urinals. I totally get why he might have a sense of getting ripped off somewhere though.
It’s too bad Heath probably didn’t get to keep the original line art used for that comic panel—it must be worth a pretty penny in its own right these days just for its association with the painting it inspired.
Lichtenstein stole the ideas and images of comic artists. They were also underpaid, but that’s another story. He couldn’t come up with his own poses and situations without copying. (And big. I guess that’s important. Big.) It seems rather snide, if it wasn’t simply incompetence, that he made it all look lame, skewed, off-center… ‘camp,’ as it were. Putting it up there to say, look how lame this stuff is! How naïve! He never even observed well enough to grasp the principle of Ben Day-type color dots, which aren’t “pink dots here, green dots here,” and so on, but overlaid primary colors in carefully organized patterns.
Real comic art looked so much better than his garbage. He was a one-trick pony. Maybe if he’d done it once or twice, or a dozen times, it would have been amusing, but he kept at it, canvas after canvas, never getting any better. Except with the dots. After a few awkward attempts, he managed to come up with a stencil for those, and they looked a little bit less cheesy. (I’d have said ‘amateurish,’ but the word is based on Latin for one who loves, and I see no sign of love in anything this wealthy merchant of spoiled canvases ever cranked out.)
Not sure what you mean by “comic book aesthetic.” The art form of comics has a range of aesthetics across its history, even if you only look at the comic book format. And Russ Heath’s original panel is much more commercial than the Lichtenstein version which has more abstracted shapes and interpretive proportions and construction. Most comics artists at the time were commercial illustrators (magazines, greeting cards, etc.). Lichtenstein is often perceived as somehow improving the original, taking something crass and meaningless and turning it into “real” art with his simplified lines. But the art was fine on its own. I think that’s the ultimate insult of all the adulation Lichtenstein receives – he took something that was already an exemplification of pop art, low art, whatever you want to call it, redrew it, and then said, “Look at the amazing transformation I did.” But both of the panels above are occupying the same space, neither is making a comment on what it’s about or its art form or anything. But one of them came first.
You’re right that Lichtenstein changed the image but that’s an overly strict interpretation of what we mean by “copy” – the better word is probably “plagiarism.” A copy can be defined as a direct reproduction, like a Xerox copy. But a plagiarist takes the core ideas of another artist, slightly modifies the execution, and calls it his own, and it’s hard to argue that Lichtenstein did anything else but plagiarize here. Maybe if he had said in the little placard next to it, “My intention was to take the great Illustrator Russ Heath’s powerful image and strip it down into something less visceral and more popular,” or something like that, then we could grant him some other kind of intent. But as it stands, the fact that he essentially drew over someone else’s art and said he was done doesn’t really absolve him of the charge.
I hear you, except the mundane “object” that inspired Lichtenstein was itself a work of art, while the soup can was an actual object. Warhol did elevate the soup can by his reproduction of it. Put it in a frame and now you can think all kinds of things about it – the beautiful industrial design of the can, the consumer culture that created it, etc. But it doesn’t work the same with another artist’s work, especially when that original artist goes uncredited, unacknowledged, still largely unknown to this day.
The can label design is commercial art. Warhol didn’t just paint a can, an object, he specifically copied the art of the label. You are being dismissive of one kind of commercial art in favor of another. When, exactly, did Warhol credit the soup label’s original designer?
Yeah, but that is the point, before then comic books wouldn’t have been considered art - not in a classical sense. The Pop Art movement saw art in commercial and non traditional sources.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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. 
