New Show, Same Lichtenstein

The Roy Lichtenstein retrospective at the Whitney Museum is jazzy, bright, snappy, and packed to the rafters. Every Lichtenstein looks instantaneously like a Lichtenstein. Paintings jump off the walls. But the show never lands. 

Lichtenstein changed art. In the early 1960s, he took comic books, advertisements, cheap printed pictures, the visual stuff of American mass culture, and made it into something utterly new. Hard black outlines, hand-painted Ben-Day dots, blazing primary colors, surfaces painstakingly self-created. He mixed high and low, original and copy, painting and reproduction. Cartoon, commercial, and comics artists hated him for stealing their work and making enormous profit while rarely giving credit, but it is indisputable his pictures were radical. His style is one of the most recognizable in all of art history. 

In fact, his language has been so thoroughly absorbed by advertising, fashion, design, merchandising, that all visual culture arguably owes him a debt. Now, a lot of stuff is made to replicate his stuff that was originally made to replicate theirs. That’s nifty and produces sparks of frisson. But his may be that peculiar fate of an artist who wins so completely that their work can no longer surprise us. This show illustrates what happens when a revolutionary visual language becomes so familiar that the revolution disappears and leaves little to chew on. 

Curators Meg Onli and artist Alex Da Corte have organized an all-over exhibition that tries to free Lichtenstein from the familiar. Maybe. They worked with a large cache of his art that was generously gifted to the museum by the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, which is a good excuse for staging the first retrospective of his work since 1993. Every generation should discover this work on its own. 

The show is titled “Roy Lichtenstein: Like New,” and its main thesis is that in our age of AI-generated images, Lichtenstein’s dots, repetitions, copies, and reproductions look newly prophetic. We’re drowning in images assembled from other images, pictures with countless sources, and sometimes no discernible human imagination behind them. It’s impressive that Lichtenstein anticipated this world before it existed. His work offers something these machines cannot: human intelligence, judgment, touch, even love, operating inside the machinery of mass reproduction. His paintings imitate mechanical processes but never surrender to them — portraits of distraught women who are lost in abstract seas of bendy dots; spare, ovular paintings of mirrored and glass surfaces that become almost real illusions. The claim is every dot is a decision. But is it? The curators say every picture is an argument about seeing. But it’s essentially the same argument. 

New relevance does not necessarily produce new revelation, and I left the exhibition wondering if the emphasis placed on artistic appropriation wasn’t a sort of self-defeating, self-replicating system that yields less and less as it goes on. Warhol, himself the subject of a Whitney survey nearly a decade ago, can still be frightening: hard to parse, deadpan, vacant, unknowable. Lichtenstein is almost exactly who we remember: formally brilliant, super slick, wry. The show doesn’t mount a convincing case that there is more to him than that. It is, if not timid, then lacking in urgency. Museums should not stop showing great artists. Far from it. But they have another job besides confirming status. They need to complicate their work. Challenge it. Make them strange again.

This show leaves Lichtenstein right where it found him.