Roy Lichtenstein: Interiors
Consider how different the sculpture Bonsai Tree is from a real bonsai tree, with its small, elegant twists and turns, its trunk a fount of change and growth. Lichtenstein’s silver-barked tree by contrast feels frozen. But though his tree doesn’t look like it will ever grow or change, as a sculptural form it’s hardly dead. Denying the fractals of natural landscapes, enlarging and objectifying the bonsai’s curves and humps, it creates an odd but ultimately powerful tension between its organic twists and the bark’s limited detail and smooth metallic sheen. Its size–much larger than a typical bonsai tree–exaggerates the sculpture’s solidity and lack of organic texture. The key question to ask of Lichtenstein’s work is whether it comments on or simply replicates the sterility of mass-manufactured objects. The details of the work provide the answer: Bonsai Tree is about the making of a tree into an inanimate yet evocative object.
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Absurdly enlarging details that were meant to add texture to commercially printed images is the equivalent of creating an oversize but underdetailed bonsai tree: the organic becomes the solid, the mechanical, the geometrical. In many images, Lichtenstein’s overall patterning almost overwhelms the objects depicted. The mask in Interior With African Mask is a tiny black-and-white form on a distant shelf, while the image is dominated by a large sectional sofa shaded with the usual diagonal black lines–which don’t change even when the angle of the cushion does, or when they’re used to shade a rug. Lichtenstein’s lines, borrowed like his dots from 19th-century printing techniques devised by Benjamin Day and others, have taken on a life of their own. Again a verdant plant occupies part of the picture, its irregular green seeming to do battle with the window’s grid of panes. Yet despite the angled sofa and the open entryway to another room, the space seems flattened, the background plant, table, and window all apparently pressing forward and turning the image into a unified, almost decorative field.
This series began when Lichten-stein, an artist in residence in Rome in 1989, focused not on the city’s great past art but on images of room interiors he found in the yellow pages, cut out, and saved. In 1991 in Los Angeles he began making prints of interiors; similar paintings soon followed. So a logical place to start here is with the prints, unfortunately displayed mostly in the exhibit’s second half. Less harsh than the paintings, they’re composed mostly of soft colors, giving them a curious gentleness, an almost Muzak-like tone. Wallpaper With Blue Floor Interior is quite different, with some of the power of the paintings: the graphic assertiveness of the shapes and their thick, glossy black outlines seem to establish a struggle between the autonomy of the object and the room’s overarching patterns.
Also converted to elements of sterile decor are the paintings by various famous artists–including Lichtenstein himself–on the walls of these rooms. Interior With T’Aime includes several paintings, among them a pseudo Kandinsky whose shapes are more schematic and whose imagery is more explicitly astronomical than Kandinsky’s–nor did Kandinsky employ the Lichtenstein-like dots and lines included here. Next to it hangs a faux Hans Hofmann, with his usual juxtaposition of squares of color with more expressionistic patterns. But he didn’t outline his squares with the cartoony black lines Lichtenstein uses, which completely defeat Hofmann’s purpose–creating a relationship between apparent opposites–by walling off the squares from the rest of the picture. To the right is a fragment of what looks like a Lichtenstein.
And though the sketches and maquettes for pieces in the show are interesting, this kind of exhaustiveness is more appropriate to a carefully assembled retrospective with a scholarly catalog and wall labels that describe the artist’s working process. Despite MCA director Robert Fitzpatrick’s helpful introduction to the show’s catalog, it’s a pretty lightweight affair whose text consists mostly of reminiscences from people who knew Lichtenstein. Some of these are interesting–but the catalog neglects such basics as when and where the artist was born (although it does give the date and place of birth of his longtime dealer, the recently deceased Leo Castelli). The absence of original research and well-argued justification for this selection of works, the show’s haphazard organization, and the ease with which Lichtenstein’s work might be mistaken for less-than-serious art, combined with his relative popularity, give the impression of a slapped together “summer lite” show, an approach the MCA has also appeared to take under earlier administrations.
