Much of the unevenly painted surface consists of pigment roughly
applied in a manner reminiscent of de Kooning’s work (FIG. 36-7).
A stuffed bald eagle attached to the lower part of the combine
spreads its wings as if lifting off in flight toward the viewer. Com-
pleting the combine, a pillow dangles from a string attached to a
wood stick below the eagle. The artist presented the work’s com-
ponents in a jumbled fashion. He tilted or turned some of the im-
ages sideways, and each overlays part of another image. The compo-
sitional confusion may resemble that of a Dada collage, but the
parts of Rauschenberg’s combines maintain their individuality
more than those in, for example, a Schwitters piece (FIG. 35-30). The
eye scans a Rauschenberg canvas much as it might survey the envi-
ronment on a walk through a city. The various recognizable images
and objects seem unrelated and defy a consistent reading, although
Rauschenberg chose all the elements of his combines with specific
meanings in mind. For example, Rauschenberg based Canyonon a
Rembrandt painting of Jupiter in the form of an eagle carrying the
boy Ganymede heavenward. The photo in the combine is a refer-
ence to the Greek boy, and the hanging pillow is a visual pun on his
buttocks.
ROY LICHTENSTEIN As the Pop movement matured, the
images became more concrete and tightly controlled. American
artist Roy Lichtenstein(1923–1997) turned his attention to com-
mercial art and especially to the comic book as a mainstay of popu-
lar culture (see “Roy Lichtenstein on Pop Art,” above). In paintings
such as Hopeless (FIG. 36-23), Lichtenstein excerpted an image
from a comic book, a form of entertainment meant to be read and
discarded, and immortalized the image on a large canvas. Aside from
that modification, Lichtenstein remained remarkably faithful to the
original comic strip image. His subject was one of the melodramatic
scenes common to popular romance comic books of the time. Lich-
tenstein also used the visual vocabulary of the comic strip, with its
dark black outlines and unmodulated color areas, and retained the
familiar square dimensions. Moreover, his printing technique,ben-
day dots,called attention to the mass-produced derivation of the im-
age. Named after its inventor, the newspaper printer Benjamin Day
(1810–1889), the benday dot system involves the modulation of col-
ors through the placement and size of colored dots. Lichtenstein
thus transferred the visual shorthand language of the comic book to
the realm of monumental painting.Painting and Sculpture, 1945 to 1970 983I
n 1963, Roy Lichtenstein was one of eight
painters interviewed for a profile on Pop Art in
Art News.G. R. Swenson posed the questions. Part
of Lichtenstein’s response follows.
[Pop Art is] the use of commercial art as a subject
matter in painting ....[Pop artists portray] what
I think to be the most brazen and threatening
characteristics of our culture, things we hate, but
which are also so powerful in their impingement
on us....I paint directly ...[without] perspec-
tive or shading. It doesn’t look like a painting of
something, it looks like the thing itself. Instead of
looking like a painting ofa billboard ...Pop Art
seems to be the actual thing. It is an intensifica-
tion, a stylistic intensification of the excitement
which the subject matter has for me; but the style
is ...cool.One of the things a cartoon does is to
express violent emotion and passion in a com-
pletely mechanized and removed style. To express
this thing in a painterly style would dilute it....
Everybody has called Pop Art “American” paint-
ing, but it’s actually industrial painting. America
was hit by industrialism and capitalism harder
and sooner ...I think the meaning of my work is
that it’s industrial, it’s what all the world will soon
become. Europe will be the same way, soon, so it
won’t be American; it will be universal.*- Roy Lichtenstein quoted in G. R. Swenson, “What Is Pop
Art? Interviews with Eight Painters,”Art News62, no. 7
(November 1963), 25, 64.
Roy Lichtenstein on Pop Art
ARTISTS ON ART36-23Roy Lichtenstein,Hopeless,1963. Oil on canvas, 3 8 3 8 . Kunstmuseum,
Basel. © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein.
Comic books appealed to Lichtenstein because they were a mainstay of American popular
culture, meant to be read and discarded. The Pop artist immortalized their images on large
canvases.1 ft.