Marking Pop’s point of no return

Roy LICHTENSTEIN’S comic-book paintings made him an icon of Pop Art in the early 1960s, a symbol of high culture appropriating the tropes of low, in the process erasing the distinctions between the two and questioning the very concept of art itself.

But to some critics, Lichtenstein barely qualified as an artist at all because his primary motif seemed to be reproducing other people’s banalities, which depended on the context of a gallery to give the image significance. “Is He the Worst Artist in the U.S.?” Life magazine asked in 1964.

Now a charming new exhibition surveys Lichtenstein’s four decades of painting, highlighting his engagement with art’s historical heritage.

“All About Art,” which runs through Feb. 22 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, features 69 of Lichtenstein’s paintings, many from private collections. The show was organized by the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. San Francisco is the exhibition’s only American venue.

“It’s not an exhaustive retrospective,” says Neal Benezra, director of the San Francisco museum, “but it’s a beautiful show, tightly focused.”

The Pop Art avatar turns out to be something of a traditionalist at heart.

“Picasso’s always been such a huge influence that I thought when I started the cartoon paintings that I was getting away from Picasso, and even my cartoons of Picasso were done almost to rid myself of his influence,” Lichtenstein told critic David Sylvester in 1997, shortly before the artist died. “I don’t think that I’m over his influence but they probably don’t look like Picassos; Picasso himself would probably have thrown up looking at my pictures.”

Lichtenstein was born in 1923 in New York and started drawing in kindergarten. He studied art at Ohio State University, painted neo-Cubist pictures and earned a living by teaching college for years. In 1951 Lichtenstein had his first solo show and thereafter he began incorporating mass media images into his work.

The exhibition’s earliest works date from 1958, when Lichtenstein sketched a series of ink drawings of Bugs Bunny, Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse -- his first foray into the iconography of comic books. But these tyro experiments will probably surprise most viewers: The drawings are explicitly Expressionist, furiously rendered portraits appearing amid a thicket of scribblings, all gesture and line -- a virtual Hegelian dialectic at war with Lichtenstein’s later, more famous works.

Before long the artist abandoned overt emotion. Turning to the Yellow Pages for inspiration, he drew generic images: a cup of coffee, a car tire, a soccer ball -- paintings that looked like advertising without logos. For Lichtenstein nothing was too dull to become fodder for his apparently artless art.

He created his breakthrough painting in 1961: “Look Mickey,” a fishing tableau of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck stolen from a cartoon. At a distance, the painting looks just like a blown-up comic, although up close a pencil sketch beneath the obviously hand-painted canvas betrays its origins.

Soon, however, all evidence of the artist’s hand disappeared from his work. Lichtenstein mined comic books for material, depicting the scenes in oversized Benday dots as if the viewer were peering extremely closely at the original printed page.

The comic-book paintings, replete with speech bubbles, revel in cliches and irony, isolating scenes out of context as if some universal truth had suddenly become captured in an instant. Sometimes Lichtenstein turned his paintings into barbs aimed at his critics. “Image Duplicator” shows a close-up of a pair of scowling eyes (“What? Why did you ask that? What do you know about my image duplicator?”).

Evolution deconstructed

Then, after four years, Lichtenstein moved on. He kept the same faux comic style but adapted it to a wider range of subjects, including such traditional artistic genres as landscape and still life. For the next 30 years the would-be subverter of art history rejoiced in it.

In 1964, Lichtenstein painted “White Cloud,” where a thin curve of yellow undulating land is paired with a white cloud streak high above; in between, the sky is a vast expanse of red, white and blue dots. Later he paid homage to Monet’s serial paintings of Rouen Cathedral. He painted bold brush strokes out of Abstract Expressionism 101 but depicted in his trademark funny-book style. He also painted stretcher frames and paintings of stretcher frames peeled back to reveal stretcher frames underneath. A series of “Entablature” paintings flattened architectural details into colorful schematics that annihilated the three-dimensionality of the original.

Lichtenstein rummaged through the attic of art history with abandon, lifting a Surrealist image from Magritte here, taking a De Kooning there. He increasingly alluded to his own place in the canon. In “Artist’s Studio No. 1” from 1973, he includes “Look Mickey” hanging on the wall.

“I had no program,” Lichtenstein recalled in his last interview, which is reprinted in the show’s catalog. “I always thought each one was the last. But then I’d see something like a way of doing a Monet through just dots that would look like a machine-made Impressionist painting.”

The final gallery showcases four stunning paintings, all made in 1996, the year before the artist died at age 73. Lichtenstein used his signature technique to limn classical Chinese scroll paintings. “Landscape With Boat,” for instance, is a dizzying fog of dots, a haze into which a tiny figure in a conical hat poles a boat, simultaneously evoking and deconstructing its archetype. “Landscape in a Fog” subtly piles dots into a mountainous vista, divided by a wave of gestural brush strokes across the middle, while a delicately painted tree pushes its way into the corner as if traditional painting were reasserting its place in the postmodernist world.

“This show fills some big gaps,” says curatorial associate Joshua Shirkey, “leading us to rethink what this artist is all about. It’s too easy to gloss over his work, but Lichtenstein is surprising. By placing that art back in context, we see what a thoughtful artist he really was.”