The 'Wham!' of Roy Lichtenstein's Prints

You can love him or not, but you can't ignore him. Roy Lichtenstein's prints are signature works during the Pop Art movement in the 1960s. His simplistic use of only 20 colors during his career is interesting by itself, but the complexity of the images and the way he maneuvered himself seamlessly out of the Pop art period to explore other icons of the 20th c. was and is a fascinating education in how an artist teaches himself to become a better artist.

Roy Fox Lichtenstein 1923 –1997 was a part of the American Pop Art movement. During the 1960s, he became a leading figure in the new American-dominated movement, along with fellow artists Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and James Rosenquist. Using comic strips as his main inspiration, Lichtenstein created tongue-in-cheek, hard-edged compositions in clean, crisp primary colors. His work was also heavily influenced by popular advertising. He described pop art as "not 'American' painting but actually industrial painting". During his career, Lichtenstein made over 300 prints, mostly in screen printing.

Lichtenstein was born in New York City, into an upper-middle-class Jewish family, where his father was a real estate broker, and his mother, a homemaker. He attended public school for a time, then enrolled at New York's Franklin School for Boys. Lichtenstein first became interested in art and design as a hobby, and then through school. In 1939, Lichtenstein enrolled in summer classes at the Art Students League of New York, where he worked under Reginald Marsh. Being an avid fan of jazz music, he frequently drew portraits of Harlem’s Apollo Theater jazz musicians while playing their instruments.

Lichtenstein went to study art at the Ohio State University. His studies were interrupted for three years (1943-1946) while he served as an orderly, draftsman, and artist in the Army during and after World War II. He returned home to visit his dying father and was discharged from the army with eligibility for the G.I. Bill. He returned to OSU and studied under Hoyt L. Sherman, who is widely regarded to have had a significant impact on his work (Lichtenstein would later name a studio the Hoyt L. Sherman Studio Art Center after his mentor). Lichtenstein continued his graduate studies at OSU, was hired as an art instructor, and received his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1949.

In 1957, he moved to upstate New York and began teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego. In 1960, he started teaching at Rutgers University alongside Allan Kaprow. In 1961-1965, Lichtenstein began his first pop images using cartoons and commercial printing techniques. Leo Castelli started displaying his work at his gallery in New York in 1961 and he had his first one-man show in 1962; the entire collection was bought by influential collectors before the show even opened. In September 1963 he took a leave of absence from teaching to focus time on his artwork.

"I think my work is different from comic strips -- but I wouldn't call it transformation; I don't think that whatever is meant by it is important to art".
Lichtenstein reproduced masterpieces by Cézanne, Mondrian and Picasso before embarking on his Brushstroke series in 1965. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art commissioned him to make a film with the help of Universal Film Studios. It was called Three Landscapes, about marine landscapes, directly related to a series of collages with landscape themes he created between 1964 - 1966.
Also in 1970, Lichtenstein purchased a former carriage house in Southampton, Long Island, built a studio on the property, and spent the rest of the 1970s in relative seclusion. Over the next ten years his style began to loosen and he expanded on what he had done before.

During a trip to Los Angeles in 1978, Lichtenstein was fascinated by lawyer Robert Rifkind's collection of German Expressionist prints and illustrated books. Small colored-pencil drawings were used as templates for woodcuts, a medium favored by Emil Nolde and Max Pechstein, as well as Dix and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. A major series of Surrealist-Pop artwork from 1979–81 is based on Native American themes. Having been inspired by Edgar Degas’ monochromatic prints from a show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he created the motifs of his Landscapes in the Chinese Style series are formed with simulated Benday dots and block contours, rendered in hard, vivid color, with all traces of the hand removed.

Lichtenstein married twice, once to Isabel Wilson, with whom he had two sons, and again to Dorothy Herzka. From 1970 until his death, Lichtenstein split his time between Manhattan and Southampton. He also had a home on Captiva Island. He was committed to his art until the end of his life, often spending at least 10 hours a day in his studio. In 1997, he died of pneumonia in New York.

Commissions
1964 New York State Pavilion, World's Fair, New York City.
1969 bedroom suite painting for Gunter Sachs, Palace Hotel, St. Moritz.
late 1970s - 1980s, major commissions for works in public places: the sculptures in Miami Beach; at Port Columbus International Airport; the Equitable Center, New York; and Barcelona.
1994 Times Square Mural , Times Square subway station.
1977 paint a Group 5 Racing Version of the BMW 320i for the BMW Art Car Project.
1977 Skowhegan Medal for Painting, Skowhegan School, Skowhegan, Maine.
1979 American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York.
1989 American Academy in Rome, Rome, Italy. Artist in residence.
1991 Creative Arts Award in Painting, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts.
1993 Amici de Barcelona, from Mayor Pasqual Maragall, L’Alcalde de Barcelona.
1995 Kyoto Prize, Inamori Foundation, Kyoto, Japan.
1995 National Medal of the Arts, Washington D.C.
The DreamWorks Records logo – last design project

Awards
1995 National Medal of Arts

Education
Parsons School of Design, The Ohio State University, Art Students League, Franklin School for Boys (now Dwight School)
Honorary Doctorate degrees:
George Washington University (1996),Bard College, Royal College of Art (1993), Ohio State University (1987), Southampton College (1980), and the California Institute of the Arts (1977).

Exhibitions
1967 first museum retrospective exhibition, Pasadena Art Museum, CA
1967 first solo exhibition in Europe at museums in Amsterdam, London, Bern and Hannover
1968 participated in documenta IV
1977 participated in documenta VI
1994 second retrospective, the Guggenheim Museum, NY
1987 first living artist to have a solo drawing exhibition, Museum of Modern Art from
2010 "Roy Lichtenstein: Meditations on Art" Museo Triennale, Milan
2010 The Morgan Library & Museum
2012 major retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago, National Gallery of Art in Washington, Tate Modern
2013 major retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris

Collections
1996 the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. – largest single repository
The Art Institute of Chicago
Dorothy Lichtenstein, and of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
National Gallery of Australia's Kenneth Tyler Collection

Nothing if Not Obsessed: The Prints of Frank Stella

"Making art is complicated because the categories are always changing. You just have to make your own art, and whatever categories it falls into will come later." - Frank Stella

The renowned American painter/printmaker, Frank Stella, was born in in 1936, in Malden, Massachusetts. After he graduated from  Princeton University in 1958 with a degree in History, Stella moved to New York City and eventually set up a studio in Manhattan. He was deeply influenced by the Abstract Expressionism movement and particularly liked the work of painters Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline. He looked at the flat, single band of color of Barnet Newman’s enormous paintings and also responded to Jasper Johns’ ‘Target’ mixed media pieces.

Stella is recognized as one of the most influential artists of the of 20^th c. (60s and 70s) for his flat, geometric paintings about ‘nothing’. Yeah, right. Nothing but an obsession with detail, depth, color, texture, and life.   He set into motion a bold new art movement formulated upon a literal ‘what you see is what you see’ concept. He abandoned pictorial references and indulged in metallic paint and geometric-shaped canvases. The public didn’t know what to make of his work at first, but they had been over-saturated with the emotionalism attached with Abstract Expressionism. This new Minimalism movement wasn’t a walk in the park for the average person, but at least it was predictable in its geometric principles and regularity. For him, he preferred that the picture function as an object rather than it representing a person, place or thing.

Stella’s paintings were included in "Three Young Americans" at Oberlin College’s  Allen Memorial Art Museum, and in the Museum of Modern Art’s "Sixteen Americans”. Stella became one of famed art dealer Leo Castelli’s stable of artists and in 1960 he began to use metallic paint and pinstripe lines to make his work. Eventually, Stella worked with letters as a shaped canvas, and then expanded that idea to include shaped canvases in concentric circles laminated on 3D wooden constructions. His colors grew more varied, and the physical shift toward the tactile surface grew more verbose.

Similarly, Stella’s approach to printmaking was just as exploratory. He began working with Master Printer Ken Tyler at Gemini G.E.L. in the mid-60s and together they came up with the then inconceivable idea to blend and mix printmaking processes.  They incorporated lithography, offset lithography, silkscreen, etching and relief,  and as the critics say, the rest is history.





I recall my first exposure to Stella’s mixed media prints at an Art Expo in Chicago in the late 1980s. As is often the case when one walks through those endless corridors displaying a cattle-call of galleries, the eyes begin to glaze and visual overload begins to set in. I turned a corner and stopped dead in my tracks before one of Stella’s six foot tall prints. I remember the vivid green and densely layered paper. Man, it had so many layers of ink (52, in fact) the thing looked like you could stand it up in a corner like an old pair of unwashed jeans. It was just fantastic, stunning to look at, and it certainly looked like no print I’d ever seen before. I promptly asked the gallery rep what it cost – as if I could afford something like that as a student. The price while high wasn’t out of reach if I wanted to sell my car and hope there was enough left over to get myself on a train back to school. You get the gist. The bug had bitten me and the die was cast. If someone could do that with a print, well there were more that had to be made.

These works were so incredible for their technical virtuosity, one understand why Stella needed to go to a printer to help him make those things. Remember, this became the era of printer-artist collaborations, and prints were flooding the art markets. An artist could make a series of prints and sell them for a fraction of the cost of a painting or sculpture. Artists recognized in those other media went, sometime at the behest of their gallery dealer, to collaborate on a print project. Fortunately, it turned a tide and from this group of artists unfamiliar with the printmaking process, many of them came to love printmaking and continued making significant prints through the next 20 years. It reinvigorated the medium and the experimental print was born.

From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, Stella branched away from his Protractor series and created a large body of work  that was loosely inspired by  Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.  He began to call for a rejuvenated abstraction, by searching the depths of Caravaggio’s Baroque-era paintings for his inspiration. 

The result was that Stella’s paintings and prints became more wildly engaged in color and gestural strokes of color and etched surfaces. He librated traditional printmakers from the confines of a plate, stone or a silk screen. His images burst out from the paper and pulled the viewer into his compositions like a Newman or Pollock painting. Stella’s work, like Helen Frankenthaler’s, expanded the medium to do something new, and whether one likes his ‘subject matter’ or not, we must express our gratitude.

Finally, Stella’s art has been seen worldwide in several retrospectives in the United States, Europe, and Japan. He continues to live and work in New York where he also remains active working with the Artists Rights Society which is committed to protecting the rights of artists. 

Awards:

1965 - Solomon Guggenheim’s ‘The Shaped Canvas’, and their 1966’s ‘Systemic Painting’

1970 – A retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, making him the youngest artist ever to receive one.

1984 - Charles Eliot Norton lectures(6) at Harvard University

2009 - National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama



*Stella pictured at right working on one of his Moby Dick inspired prints.

Helen Frankenthaler's Prints Expand the Medium

Several newspapers have noted the recent passing of American artist Helen Frankenthaler, and her contributions in the field of 20^th c. painting. While her accolades in that area are numerous; having received recognition by way of dozens of honorary doctoral degrees, being a presidential appointee to the National Council on the Arts and a recipient of the National Medal of Arts from President George W. Bush in 2002, her accolades in printmaking have yet to be adequately praised.  I will begin by acknowledging Frankenthaler’s artistic beginnings and proceed to look at some of her prints, which are nothing short of spectacular.

Helen Frankenthaler was born the third of three daughters to a wealthy New York family. She was educated at the Dalton School studying under Rufino Tamayo, and at Bennington College in Vermont.  She later studied with the effervescent Hans Hofmann, whose advocacy of a ‘push-pull’ methodology lead to the Abstract Expressionist movement.

In her mid-twenties, her now famous ‘pour and stain’ approach to painting gained the attention of critic Clement Greenberg, and she was proclaimed the ‘bridge’ between the artists working in Abstract Expressionism to the Color Field Painters. She was included in a show about Post-Painterly Abstraction and the moniker stuck. Her personal relationship with Greenberg, and later marriage to Ab Ex painter/writer Robert Motherwell, propelled Frankenthaler into the midst of two male-dominant art movements, where she became friends with artists David Smith, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock and Willem and Elaine de Kooning.

Frankenthaler, along with fellow painters Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, Lee Krasner, and Elaine deKooning made their work, and rebuffed the idea of feminism, or being recognized for their sex over their artwork. They saw themselves as artists and the equal of their male peers. She said,"I had something to say in terms of painting and went about doing it.... What has made it work, or what makes certain paintings successful or not, has to do with my being a painter and a thinking, feeling person, more than my sex, color, height, origin." 

It wasn’t until 1961 that Frankenthaler made her first print, but in the 1970s, she began to gain recognition for her printmaking. She went to Japan and studied traditional woodblock techniques where she produced a body of work inspired by the 11^th c. "The Tale of Genji" series.

She became known as an innovative printmaker. Her inventive lithographs, etchings and screen prints resembled her paintings, but most people agree it was her woodblock prints that opened new doors for her creatively. They possessed a fresh approach, both in color and in scale.  She was able to produce a level of nuanced color and line rarely seen previously in a medium not known (at least not in the West) for its subtlety. Through her woodblocks and experimental prints,  like 1974's "Savage Breeze", she helped re-open the door to printmaking at a time when it had been suffering from lack of interest, and inspired other artists to re-explore that medium.

Frankenthaler went to make prints at ULAE at the invitation of Tatanya Grossman. She took to it like a duck to water and felt the experience liberated her. She also worked with Ken Tyler at Tyler Graphics in upstate New York, and by the time of her death had produced over 150 editioned prints and over two hundred monotype/mixed media works.

“East and Beyond” was Frankenthaler’s first foray into making the grainy, unforgiving wood block receptive to her own sense of vibrant, though translucent, color and organic forms. Her composition was so open compared with traditional woodblock techniques that it has had a deep influence on the medium ever since. It would eventually become known to the development of contemporary printmaking what “Mountains and Sea” had been to the development of Color Field painting.

“Essence Mulbery” (as seen above) is one of the first Frankenthaler prints I remember seeing. I was taken immediately by its subtle, multi-layered colors and what I’ll term ‘respect’ for the surface of the matrix and the feel of the paper on which it is printed . She understood how to work with the grain of the wood to make her images, and though she went onto other printmaking methods, her woodblocks remain my personal favorites. I saw, and still see in them, an extension pathway of her colorful field paintings. One also sees here a reference to Rothko’s own search for color field abstractions is felt in this work, (though he and some of the other Ab Ex painters ran their course and found nothing else to pursue or no new bridge to cross, thus ending their careers and their lives too soon.)

Frankenthaler’s prints eventually bridged the gap between her flowing painting style and her interested in the linear woodblocks. For that reason, I am showing one of her later prints and one of the woodblocks used to create it. The block itself is a work of art, with its delicate cuts and residual stains of color imbedded into the woodblock’s surface. Truly the woman understood the medium as a master should.

Critics weren’t always in agreement with Frankenthaler’s influence on 20^th c. art, saying her later paintings didn’t have a certain weight as did her earlier works; that they ventured in to a marginal, pretty coloring phase, speaking of nothing in particular. Their short-sighted observations proclaim the difficulty an artist often has in maintaining the art world’s, or the critic’s, attention once their ‘true moment’ has passed onto successive movements. Artists mature and evolve, which sometimes goes against the forays of the art critic to find the next ‘thing’ that will transform a vision for future artists and movements.

Frankenthaler understood the changes of nature, and the art world. She was substantive and tough when the situation called for it, and in touch with the intuitive nature of color, and of what it means to be ‘human’ within those color-filled environments. Her prints stand alone as an inspiration for artists and printmakers, and her contribution to the medium cannot be questioned or underestimated.