COVER STORY : A Few Good Colors Are Plenty : Has it really been 30 years since Roy Lichtenstein first brought us those cartoon paintings? Well, yes. And now take a guided tour with the artist through his life, times and all those dots

On a bright winter morning, before the arctic weather descended upon the city, Roy Lichtenstein walks into the Guggenheim Museum. Although it’s a Thursday and the museum is closed to visitors, the entire building feels animated by a spectacular retrospective of Lichtenstein’s work. The paintings--with their bold outlines and primary-colored images--spiral around the Frank Lloyd Wright ramp, spilling out like a brilliant reel of film unwinding.

The show, organized by Diane Waldman, Guggenheim senior curator and deputy director, opens at Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art today, featuring 88 paintings and sculptures spanning the artist’s three-decade career. (In 1969, Waldman organized the Guggenheim’s first Lichtenstein retrospective; 25 years later, she returned to his work with unflagging enthusiasm.)

Lichtenstein’s choosing to work within a limited palette might seem harshly deliberate (he once told a journalist that “yellow is yellow and red is red. . . . To me, skies are the same everywhere: A sky is simply blue dots”), but his visual lexicon--everything for the perfect home found through the Yellow Pages, troubled girls lost in romance-comic episodes, brusque men engaged in business and war, and the formidable icons of modernist art and architecture--is extraordinarily rich and facile. Lichtenstein knows his material, and he riffs on it with a virtuoso’s flair. “Like Stravinsky or Thelonious Monk,” he says, “I like making dissonances in my work.”

When Lichtenstein and I meet on this winter day to view his retrospective together, his look is completely unself-conscious, reassuringly casual: well-worn canvas deck shoes, a boat-neck sweater, his silver hair tied into a ponytail about the size of a small sable watercolor brush.

He’s surprisingly unassuming, considering his fame and influence, and yet he is known for that. In the mid-’70s, when Conceptual artist Don Celender produced a pack of art-world baseball trading cards for Ivan Karp’s O. K. Harris Gallery, Lichtenstein’s read: “The nicest guy in the art world.” In a Vanity Fair profile published last summer, the 70-year-old artist was described as “preternaturally boyish” and remarkably shy.

In 1970, Lichtenstein moved to Southampton, on the eastern end of Long Island; for 13 years, it was his sole residence and studio. He now divides his time between Southampton and Manhattan’s West Village. “I do love the light out on Long Island,” he remarks. “But I always painted the entablatures (architectural images) out there and the seascapes in the city.”

Before we begin our tour at the Guggenheim, Lichtenstein takes off his jacket and casts about the gallery looking for somewhere to leave it. The public cloakroom is closed, and the sole guard who has been assigned to us is lurking at a respectful distance. Lichtenstein gingerly places his jacket on a ledge at the bottom of the museum’s ramp. Still hesitant, he looks up: His paintings have taken complete command of the space--he can probably leave his jacket anywhere he wants to.

In the center of the ground-floor gallery stands a painted bronze sculpture from 1981 titled “Brushstroke.” It’s a petrified Expressionist gesture, an image of fluidity rendered in the most rigid, solid way possible. Lichtenstein delightedly describes the sculpture and its anti-intuitive concept as “absurd.” As he rolls the word around in his mouth, his enormous blue eyes widen and he smiles rather slyly--absurdity is clearly delicious.

In his paintings, Lichtenstein has rendered, with dense black outlines, such ordinarily ephemeral events as sunsets and explosions. “I think it is absurd,” says Lichtenstein, “to outline brush strokes and paint drips and to make water glasses and light rays more palpable.”

Lichtenstein is a New Yorker, born and bred. He grew up across Central Park from the Guggenheim in the West 80s. He attended the Franklin School for Boys, graduating in 1940. He spent that summer studying with American Social Realist painter Reginald Marsh at the Art Students League.

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RL: New York was so different in those days. Obviously there were the same streets and many of the same buildings but so many fewer cars. There were no traffic jams, and there was always a place to park. The subway only cost a nickel, and you could go anywhere. The cars had woven-rush seats, and men would stand up to give women their seats. My mother said that in her day, when they still had trolley cars, if a woman got on the trolley, all the men would stand up and tip their hats. Can you imagine that? They certainly don’t do that a lot anymore. It’s hard to imagine those days when no one would leave the house without a hat.

SM: As a child, did you visit the Metropolitan Museum?

RL: I went there a lot; it was always empty. All of the museums then were relatively empty.

SM: They didn’t have scarves and coffee mugs for sale around every corner.

RL: That’s right. Now when you walk around through the show, you are led straight into the shop. Apparently, it’s a really successful idea, so the gift shops are now included as part of the museum’s budget.

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In Lichtenstein’s “Modern Paintings and Sculpture” series from the late ‘60s, he captures another New York era--Art Deco. In “Modern Sculpture With Velvet Rope”--two highly geometric brass stanchions are strung together with a theatrical velvet rope--he creates a period icon.

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RL: Art Deco wasn’t actually a part of my life, but it was a style that I saw in the movies. I was 11 when Rockefeller Center and Radio City were being built. Of course, there was also the Chrysler Building, but it didn’t really make an impression on me when I was young.

My grandparents had come from Germany, so my family was still living a German Victorian life --with a lot of big heavy furniture.

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Lichtenstein left New York in 1940 to study fine arts at Ohio State University. In 1943, he was drafted into the Army. Asked how long he served, the artist answers: “Long enough. I didn’t set the war effort back too much.”

In 1946, he returned to Ohio State and studied with Hoyt Sherman. Sherman, a follower of educational reformer John Dewey, was an engineer, artist and the author of the renowned “Drawing by Seeing.”

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RL: Hoyt Sherman was interested in perception as it pertains to art. For his class, he had created a room that was totally dark--which is actually a very difficult thing to do. In this room, he would flash a slide of an image just made up of smudges. We would have a pile of newsprint in front of us so we could immediately make a drawing of what we had just seen. When you view a slide in total darkness, you experience a very strong afterimage. Each slide would appear very quickly in a flash of light. You couldn’t focus on separate parts, so in the darkness you would see an entire afterimage. You would have to reach for the paper, make a drawing and use a real visual, kinesthetic sense. Taking that information into the real world was very useful. I tried to continue with that same strong, visual sense.

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Lichtenstein received his bachelor of fine arts from Ohio State; he completed his masters degree there too, in 1949, and also took part in his first group exhibition there.

“I always wanted to be in New York,” Lichtenstein says, “but I couldn’t just move to New York--I had a family, kids, I had to make a living. At that time, very well-known artists--Ad Reinhardt, Robert Motherwell--were teaching in New York. Any artists who hadn’t had a million shows couldn’t possibly get a teaching job in New York.”

Lichtenstein taught in Ohio, then at the State University of New York at Oswego; in 1960, he was appointed assistant professor at Douglass College, the women’s division of Rutgers University, in New Jersey.

At Rutgers, Lichtenstein met artist Allan Kaprow, who, as Lichtenstein recalls, “had finished with paintings and was doing Happenings.”

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RL: Allan Kaprow introduced me to Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, George Segal and Bob Whitman. Everyone was doing Happenings. I went to them, but I never did one myself. I am probably the only artist in the world who has no idea of what to do with a movie or a play. I never had any idea for anything that happens in time. Every artist always wants to be a movie director. I guess movies are glamorous, and it’s more fun than being in the studio alone, painting.

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Kaprow, who also coined the term Happenings , argued to Lichtenstein that paintings didn’t have to look like art.

Although Lichtenstein was already working from two-dimensional sources (reproductions of history paintings, advertisements, a $10 bill), his paintings still greatly resembled the art that he had looked at--there was the Cubist influence of Picasso, the fancifulness of Klee and Miro and the flat Modernist style found in the work of Stuart Davis.

By 1960, Lichtenstein was making paintings of what he saw in the world--the Benday dot screens used in commercial printing, the single-frame dramas of bubble-gum comics, the advertisements in the Yellow Pages.

He began to relate painting more directly to printing. “Dots are not an elegant European painting texture,” he says. “They relate to a vernacular form of expression.”

In 1961, Kaprow suggested that Lichtenstein show his paintings to Ivan Karp, who was then working with art dealer Leo Castelli. Lichtenstein tied some paintings to the top of his station wagon and drove into the city from his home in Highland Park, N.J.

As the artist carried his painting “The Engagement Ring” (one of his blond Sunday-funnies heroines, wearing a string of pearls and sporting bright red fingernails, asks pensively: “It’s . . . it’s not an engagement ring, is it?”) up the gallery stairs, Karp was talking to a group of students. When Lichtenstein and his painting reached the group, Karp turned to Lichtenstein and his painting and announced: “And this is the art of the ‘60s!”

And it was.

“Of course I felt wonderful,” Lichtenstein recalls. Castelli, who became the seminal champion of Pop art, asked the artist to join the gallery. Lichtenstein had his first show there in February, 1962. (Castelli initially turned down the work of another artist working with cartoon imagery--Andy Warhol, who joined the gallery in 1964.)

The current Lichtenstein retrospective begins with his 1961 painting “Look Mickey” (another of the paintings strapped to the roof of his car that fateful day). In it, Donald Duck, a fishhook caught in his coattails, peers ecstatically into the water and exclaims--”Look Mickey, I’ve hooked a big one!!” Looking on this hapless scene, Mickey Mouse stifles a guffaw.

“Look Mickey” was the big one. It remains an astonishingly fresh painting; with its purposely flat painting style and a seemingly unpainterly concern for shape rather than light, as well as its humorously banal subject matter regarded with real seriousness, the work cracked open the ideas and methods that would fuel Lichtenstein’s work during the next 30 years. It is the work that Lichtenstein has referred to as his “first painting with no Expressionism in it.”

Until quite recently, the artist had kept this painting in his personal collection; “Look Mickey” is now a promised gift to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, in honor of its 50th anniversary last year.

While Lichtenstein and I walk through his show together, he stops at paintings, pauses before speaking, surveys the canvas for changes, considers the passage of time and then introduces them as warmly as an old friend.

As we arrive at the 1962 painting “Masterpiece” (a man and a woman look at a painting, and the woman exclaims: “Why Brad darling, this painting is a masterpiece! My, soon you’ll have all of New York clamoring for your work!”) Lichtenstein confides, irony tingeing his smile, that “she”--the sloe-eyed blonde oozing with enthusiasm--”really does know--she can tell masterpieces very easily, this girl.”

And Brad, the hero of this particular series of paintings, has to agree. “I always changed their names to Brad,” Lichtenstein says of the manly men he would borrow from comic books to star in his paintings. “Brad sounded like the real masculine name at that time.”

Over the years, Lichtenstein has taken apart images and reassembled them according to his own methods. Besides making use of popular images, he has quoted liberally from art history as well. Picassos, Mondrians and Monets have all been translated into Lichtenstein’s unique language. Beginning in the ‘70s, art became more obviously his subject. He works like an editor, selecting images with the precise resonance and exact meanings.

“I don’t really analyze the images,” he says. Many of the sources for his paintings appear as illustrations in the exhibition’s catalogue. Over the years, he has filled notebooks with found images, potential subject matter for his paintings.

“Sometimes I will see something interesting, but it will only become usable much later,” he explains. “I just use what feels right to me.”

He has used banal images borrowed from newspapers--a woodcut version of Gilbert Stuart’s famous portrait of George Washington found in a Hungarian newspaper, a golf ball advertisement painted in the style of Mondrian and an illustration of the before-and-after effects of invisible reweaving--a truly modern miracle--rendered in Lichtenstein’s painting as a stark religious subject.

“They really did a good job; you can hardly see it,” Lichtenstein says as he facetiously examines his own handiwork--as if his artist’s representation of this subject were, in fact, the remarkable genuine article.

“When I saw what kind of picture this ad could make, I thought that making it a diptych would make it even more absurd.”

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In 1964, Lichtenstein was commissioned to paint his first large-scale mural--for the New York State Pavilion, a circular building designed by Philip Johnson, at the World’s Fair.

“There were about 10 artists who were commissioned--Rauschenberg, Rosenquist, Warhol all did something,” Lichtenstein recalls. “I was still living in Highland Park, so I constructed a scaffolding in front of the garage. I made a painting of a woman looking out the window. I thought that the curtains and the siding, everything that didn’t appear on the building but did appear in my painting, could ruin the architecture. I thought the painting was huge--it was 24 feet high and 16 feet wide. But when I got it to the fair, it looked like nothing. There was a UniRoyal tire that was 80 feet high. It’s true about sculpture too--if you place it next to a building that is 50 stories high, it disappears. It looks like a brooch on the architecture.”

Lichtenstein has continued to create murals. Beginning in the 1980s he has worked on commissioned murals for specific architectural sites. At Castelli’s Greene Street Gallery, a temporary mural was completed in just eight days, after months of planning by the artist and his assistants. Working on such a large scale (at its highest point, the mural was 18 feet high and nearly 96 feet long), Lichtenstein was able to rework his old images (Art Deco motifs, Pop images of Swiss cheese and black-and-white composition book covers, the petrified brush stroke) mixed in with new and references to other artists’ paintings. The scale, like that of an epic motion picture, allowed him to cover a great deal of territory and time. Although the Greene Street mural was only temporary, Lichtenstein told a writer that he had created it “for the pleasure of the dance.”

Lichtenstein’s large-scale projects--”Mural With Blue Brushstroke” (1986) at New York’s Equitable Tower and “Bauhaus Stairway: The Large Version” (1989) at the Creative Artists Agency in Beverly Hills--are history paintings of a new and impressive variety. Lichtenstein’s murals convey a late-20th-Century panoramic view of art history by simultaneously replaying the artist’s own early work alongside references to the work of other artists.

For his subject matter, Lichtenstein has always preferred working from the two dimensional, the already reproduced image. In the 1970s, he began a series of paintings of entablatures, the architectural friezes that run along the facades of buildings. Lichtenstein deviated from his usual method of finding images and in a rare instance took his own photographs of the classical cornices found on various Manhattan buildings.

“The message found in that type of architectural detail is that ‘this is substantial,’ ” he explains. “The entablatures really do represent culture, the Establishment.”

As painted by Lichtenstein, the entablatures appear without any context; their long, narrow horizontal formats give the impression that the geometric pattern runs on endlessly. They are also, despite their architectural reference, decidedly formal and abstract.

During this same period in the early ‘70s, Lichtenstein also worked on a series of “Mirror” paintings. The mirrors too are abstract; the light reflected in them is reduced to a series of dots and diagonal lines. For the “Mirror” paintings, Lichtenstein also took photographs.

“I do usually work from two dimensions,” he says. “I don’t work from real things. But I needed an idea of what mirrors really look like; I photographed magnifying mirrors because your reflection then appears out of focus and you don’t get in the subject matter.”

In 1978, he painted “Self-Portrait,” a Magritte-style joke--the artist is represented by the open neckline of a white T-shirt topped by a rectangular mirror reflecting rows of dots.

“There’s no way to tell if it’s a self-portrait or if it isn’t,” the artist remarks with amusement. “Anyway, I think ‘Self Portrait’ is always a good title for a painting.” He looks at his watch and realizes he’s about to be late for a lunch date. We start to race through the show, no longer lingering, making a quick remark here and there.

Lichtenstein’s devotion to the two-dimensional is evident everywhere. In a group of ceramic works, tottering stacks of teacups and portrait heads of cartoon heroines, shade and contour have been indicated in the most two-dimensional way--patterns of dots and thickened lines--across the three-dimensional surfaces.

The “Reclining Mermaid” (1979), a sculpture commissioned by the Miami Beach Theater for the Performing Arts, is a silhouette of enameled steel reclining between the cutout sky and sea. “I was thinking of a Henry Moore with a slice cut through it,” the artist says.

In the last gallery, all the years come together magnificently in Lichtenstein’s recent paintings, the “Interiors.” Furnished with advertisements from the Yellow Pages, these interiors are also decorated with art--old and new, invented and borrowed.

In these paintings, the artist juggles his own “Girl With a Tear” with a kidney-shaped swimming pool, a comically reconstructed bonsai tree and his own living-room suites of the ‘60s. These interiors are large, invigorating, ambitious: The bright rooms are reflected in angled mirrors, the homely images culled from the Yellow Pages are romanced in grand style, and the high-art references are given a good-humored tweak. The “Interiors” are complex and lively, a brilliantly performed riff to make a virtuoso feel proud.

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In the midst of these glorious “Interiors,” the artist apologizes for having to run off so suddenly. Together, we ride the elevator to the ground floor, where his jacket is still lying safely on the ledge.

Looking back at some of the early paintings, Lichtenstein remarks: “When I did those paintings, they were so new, almost vulgar, too fresh. They didn’t have any museum qualities. Now, they’re a little grayer, and they almost look precious. Here they are under glass, framed, taken care of, hung up in a museum.”

“Maybe it’s just the passing of time . . . ,” I start to suggest. “That legitimized the work,” he answers, and then he really does have to run.

On Fifth Avenue, the brisk air throws the city into sharp outline: black, leafless trees line the park’s edge, and the enormous white, slightly off-kilter shape of the Guggenheim looks like a cutout against the bright blue sky. A row of taxis and one enormous white limousine are lined up outside the museum’s entrance. With a bright step, Lichtenstein runs off and hops into a waiting cab--as yellow as yellow in any one of his paintings--and heads downtown.