Traversing the Highwire from Pop to Optical

O n the basis of his retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, it is evident that Roy Lichtenstein forged a narrow trajectory through the thickets of contemporary art. Unlike some of his protean fellow artists, such as David Hockney or Frank Stella, he found his style early in his career and followed its course with almost scientifi c precision for his entire life. Through an obsessive focus on the techniques of graphic production, he turned popular imagery into a high form of art and an exploration of the limits of visual perception. The core concept of Lichtenstein's art is the iconic—drastic simplifi cation of line and shadowing to reduce to the Platonic ideal of the object depicted— golf ball, truck tire, composition book, girl in love, or even the basic brushstroke of a daub of paint [1]. The basic inspiration of these icons is advertising imagery and comic book frames. Throughout his artistic life, he drew his imagery from the detritus of printed material—gum wrapper comics and small ads from the backs of newspapers—deliberately elevating visual sources at the opposite pole from the high art of the Renaissance. His fi rst comic works were motivated by his sons, who challenged him by saying if he was such a great artist, could he draw Mickey Mouse for them? Lichtenstein was so stimulated by the result that he worked in the comic book style from then on. Interesting, Chuck Close tells a similar story about his own work, although in reverse. In his case a group of school kids were not " getting " his art and challenged him in the same way to prove his expertise. Close passed the test, but continued in his compulsive style, exploring the minutiae of the pixel structure in his grandiose portraits, while Lichtenstein explored the iconographic largesse of the new domain opened up by this challenge. Lichtenstein's cartoon style of representation can be seen as an ironic commentary on the elitism of art, implying that art is merely a selection from the endless variety of images that bombard us. His self-mockery is exemplifi ed by the second picture in the exhibition, a six-foot canvas bearing the letters " ART " [2]. In this piece Lichtenstein is explicitly interrogating the artistic community on the boundaries of the concept of art. Is the raw symbol placed in a gallery suffi cient to constitute an …