The Image Duplicator

By ROBERT HUGHES

In the retrospective of more than 100 paintings by Roy Lichtenstein, curated by Diane Waldman for the Guggenheim Museum, you can almost cut the atmosphere of deja vu with a knife. Doubtless, part of this is due to the artist's prolonged success in the marketplace; Lichtenstein is a very prolific artist, and his works are in most museums. But their effect has spread far beyond the originals. His images, coming initially out of mass reproduction itself, slide back into it with the utmost ease and have done so for the past 30 years, filling memory with tiny Lichtenstein clones.

Then you have to reckon with their effect on ads, packaging, T shirts, window design in shops, the whole reappropriation party -- amusing and even joyous at first, and then, like most parties, a drag -- that the American commercial world threw to welcome back the images and techniques Lichtenstein took from it and put into a zippier, more art-conscious form, ripe for reuse as "quality" stuff.

There was nothing quality-ridden about the artist's original sources -- a smudgy, one-column figure of a girl with a beach ball advertising a resort in the Poconos, a moony frame from a romance comic. But by the time such things had been run through the loop from ad to art to ad again, they had become as invested with glamour as a photo by Avedon. The sheer pervasiveness of Lichtenstein's style rivals and maybe even exceeds Warhol's, even though, unlike Warhol, he kept his own distance from the ad industry as an artist and never offered himself to it as a celebrity. Thus for the young, Lichtenstein must seem to have been around forever, while for the middle-aged there is no recapturing that first shock of seeing big, painted comic strips on a gallery wall back in the early '60s.

Time has done its annoying work, converting Lichtenstein into a historical figure remarkable for his taste, his dependable virtuosity and his pictorial manners. He has become the great academician of the Pop movement -- its equivalent of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, the English artist who, a hundred years ago, attained the summit of popularity with his idealized, skillfully painted and mildly sexy reconstructions of classical Roman life, done again, and again, and again.

You can't imagine people asking themselves with bated breath, "What will Lichtenstein do next?" You know the answer, although the exact image he will do it to is as yet unknown. It will be done very well, probably on a huge canvas, with perfect decorum and an unfaltering sense of design, every black line in its right place, not a slippage in the stripes and Benday dots. Its flat, posterish colors will read with infrangible aplomb. It will parody other art, as in the past Lichtenstein's work has parodied everything from Art Deco to synthetic Cubism, from Franz Marc's horses to Monet's versions of Rouen Cathedral, from Mondrian's squares to the generic brushstroke of late Abstract Expressionism. It will have a number of concealed jokes for the art-initiated, often genuinely funny ones -- as when, redoing Matisse's Still Life with "Dance" in 1974, Lichtenstein inserted a comic-strip blast of musical notes to give the figures something to jive to and popped a straw-bound Chianti flask (an archetypal kitsch symbol of the artist's studio) into the still life in the foreground.

Last, it will "carry" well, because Lichtenstein is a master of elision and compression -- and this is why his paintings manage, against all the architectural odds, to defeat Frank Lloyd Wright's hostility to any picture unlucky enough to fetch up in the Guggenheim. The one thing it will not do, however, is purge your emotions through pity and terror.

On the other hand, you can't really blame Roy Lichtenstein for not living up to Sophocles. Tragic elevation -- or at least the version of it promoted by the rhetoric of late Abstract Expressionism -- was exactly what he reacted against when he started out during the early '60s. Was real American art loaded with signs of commitment and authenticity -- Pollock drips, De Kooning stripes? Then Lichtenstein would go to the opposite extreme and paint thin copies of the least arty things within reach: romance and adventure comic strips.

He reacted to these crude and, in most eyes, culturally negligible designs in the way an earlier American stylist, Elie Nadelman, had responded to anonymous folk art. He found beauty and a sort of wry pathos in them, along with a disregarded but distinct sense of style. Lichtenstein wasn't the first artist to react to American comic strips. Miro is plausibly said to have been influenced by George Herriman's now classic Krazy Kat. Apart from Stuart Davis, however, he was the first American artist to do so, because American artists had always been rather ashamed of their own vernacular.

Lichtenstein's early strip-based paintings deserve all the enthusiasm they have evoked. Like the Iliad, they come in two basic subjects: girls and war; sometimes, as in The Kiss, 1962, both appear together. The comic frame is the key that enabled Lichtenstein to unlock his nostalgia for experiences he was old enough to have had but didn't -- he went into a pilot training program in Mississippi in 1944 and might have been that pink boy embracing his sweetheart in front of the bomber. His girls are the nymphs of a lost Arcadia of gush, as remote from us now as Gibson girls were from the '60s. Their innocence is oddly counterpointed by the naivete with which they are painted.

Astutely, Lichtenstein realized that the halftone dots of a printed comic strip could be enlarged along with the rest of the image, but at that stage he didn't know how to do it evenly: he used stencils that smudged, so the big areas of neck and cheek came out with a random sort of acne. They now look touchingly handmade, which is not to their disadvantage, and their sense of formal rigor has lasted well.

Lichtenstein has been typecast as "the comic-strip artist," but in fact comic strips take up only an early phase of his work. By 1965 he had stopped basing images on them. He was never to refer to comics again, except now and then by including a parody of one of his own earlier paintings in a parody of an elegant interior -- ah, well, I'm a classic too now, feels funny but that's art-life.

Instead he turned to incongruous subjects that didn't fit his achieved style: huge versions of Abstract Expressionist brushstrokes, perversely rendered in flat color and Benday dots; or, most successfully, mirrors. The Mirror paintings of 1969-72 remain entrancing because of all Lichtenstein's later work, they are the only ones in which his now cleaned-up techniques allowed for a degree of mystery and ambiguity: they are perfect and icy, and reflect nothing but themselves -- a proleptic comment on his own future work.

Then he started doing other pictorial styles as subjects of his own. Picasso, Fernand Leger, Carlo Carra, Max Beckmann and so on. Then kitsch Modernism, as imagined by cartoonists. The trouble with these versions of Modernist classics 'n' clinkers is their sameness. After a while, it isn't very interesting to be shown that just about anything can be turned into a Lichtenstein, congealed in his cryogenic style. There's none of the engaged imagination, the sense of a transforming mind at work, that one gets in, say, Miro's wild versions of a 17th century Dutch interior, down the road at the Museum of Modern Art. Lichtenstein's are clever and highly worked, but while acknowledging their wit and skill, you would rather be looking at the real origins of these pastiches. Civilized irony is a grace and an asset, but it doesn't need to be pumped up to the size of the Sistine ceiling. In this later work, one sees the triumph of industry over inspiration. "What do you know about my Image Duplicator?" snarled a mad scientist in one of Lichtenstein's early paintings. What we know about Lichtenstein's own Image Duplicator is that by now it works too well.