Pop Art - 20th Century Art History

Roy Lichtenstein is an American painter , sculptor , printmaker and decorative artist . His paintings based on the motifs and procedures of comic strips and advertisements made him one of the central figures of American Pop art

He first studied under Reginald Marsh in a summer course at the Art Students League , New York , in 1939 , continuing from 1940 to 1943 at Ohio State University in Columbus . He was particularly influenced by the teaching of Hoyt L . Sherman , a painter , designer and architect who introduced his students to modernism . Sherman was interested in the

br psychology of perception and problems of pictorial representation . In his teaching he insisted that the act of representation should be separated from everyday experience and considered solely for its formal qualities , as an `abstraction (Rosenblum , 1999 , 192 ) In the course of his life Roy Lichtenstein adhered to that belief

After military service in Europe , in World War II , Lichtenstein returned to Columbus in 1946 and in 1949 completed his Master of Fine Arts . The subject-matter of his early works became apparent c . 1949-50 . Drawing on the biomorphic abstraction and heroic themes of Abstract Expressionism Lichtenstein painted such subjects as anthropomorphic plants , beautiful women in gardens , and wild animals , as well as romantic medieval subjects of knights and battles . All this was painted with a subtle irony , and stylistically oriented towards European modernists Picasso Klee , Kandinsky and Miru . In 1951 Lichtenstein devised his first major theme : American history and the conquest of the `Wild West ' as in Inside Fort Laramie (Alloway , 1983 , 14 . He borrowed subjects treated by 19th-century artists , first using such well-known models as Emanuel Leutze 's Washington Crossing the Delaware and early paintings of American Indians by Carl Wimar and Carl Bodmer , and then turning to anonymous illustrations . The source material on which he based his pictures was selected for its wealth of authentic detail and for its dependence on pictorial conventions (Alloway , 1975 , 145 . He adopted a series of different artistic languages , first approximating Picasso 's style of the 1940s , in 1956 turning to a more ornamental idiom and then to Rococo motifs , and finally turning to abstraction in 1958 in a late variation of Action painting

Lichtenstein taught from 1946 to 1951 at Ohio State University , then from 1957 at the State University of New York at Oswego , and from 1960 to 1963 at Douglass College , Rutgers University in New Brunswick , NJ where he met Allan Kaprow and other artists . These contacts encouraged his interest in cartoon imagery , stemming initially from small-scale 19th-century illustrations and from an anthropomorphic treatment of animals in the work of such modern artists as Miru (Gaggi , 1989 Lichtenstein recognized that devices favored by cartoonists were very similar to those employed by such painters as Picasso and Klee , whom he had studied so intensively

In 1961 Lichtenstein made the final break with his early work . Whereas he had previously translated his source materials into personal variants of Cubism or Constructivism , he now appropriated from comic strips not only the subject-matter...