Pop Art = Roy Lichtenstein

My mom and I spent an afternoon at the Skirball in Los Angeles on Sunday.  The Skirball is a cultural center, focusing on Jewish culture.  While we were there, we saw the Noah's Ark exhibit, which was just extraordinary.  Children and adults with both love it.  We also saw an exhibit called American Dreams, about Jews and the history of baseball.  Any baseball fan will want to see this.  But what we actually went to see, was the Roy Lichtenstein exhibit.

Roy Lichtenstein is one of my favorite artists of the last half of the 20th century.  He came on the scene in the early 1960's.  He originally began as abstract expressionist, but soon changed course.  He felt there were too many artists in that movement, and decided to do something else.  He decided to take the comic book style and elaborate on it, and voila, a new art movement was begun.  It was called Pop Art, and Lichtenstein is definitely the finest example of this type of art.

Lichtenstein worked (printed) at Gemini G.E.L., the premier print studio of its time.  Other contemporaries of Lichtenstein, like Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, and Claus Oldenberg, also worked there.  I was lucky enough to know one of the owners of Gemini, Stanley Grinstein.  He and his wife's interest in modern art led to founding of Gemini.  I was fortunate to  have been able to observe famous artists at work in the studio,  and see  many prints before they were finished and available to the public.  I will never forget one day when Ellen, Stanley's daughter, took me to the studio.  I had commented on how vibrant I found the colors that Lichtenstein used.  She wanted to show me what  old prints from the 1960's that had been in a dark drawer for 30 years actually looked like.  They were shades brighter than anything that had been exposed to light.

One of the more interesting things that Lichtenstein did was take the style of famous artists, and make them his own.  He did this with Picasso, Van Gogh and Monet.  He did an fascinating series of haystacks, in the Monet style, but with his own twist.  At the Skirball exhibit they had a full scale copy of his take on Van Gogh's bedroom.  You know the painting, with the bed and the chair.  Lichtenstein's picture is influenced by Van Gogh, but very much his own.

Lichtenstein died in the late 1990's, but still had time to do so much.  He was a skilled artist who created an art movement, Pop Art.  Here are just a few of his hundreds of contributions to the art world.  Get to the Skirball if you can.  There's so much to see there.