Roy Lichtenstein: Pop Goes the Module

A sampling of modular paintings by Roy Lichtenstein (gridded arrangement by us).

Roy Lichtenstein is an artist widely known for paintings whose form and content are derived from comic book illustration. So it comes as quite a pleasant surprise to us to discover that his oeuvre includes a series of ten canvases and additional preparatory drawings based on a modular theme.

Lichtenstein executed the bulk of these works in 1969. Nine of the ten works were composed of four identical panels arranged in a grid; a single canvas, done in 1968, contains nine panels in a similar arrangement. All but two are square in overall proportion, since the individual panels in them are themselves square. All of the finished works are rather large in scale, measuring somewhere between eight and ten feet in either direction.

We find these pieces compelling on a number of fronts. From an historical perspective, it’s refreshing to see an artist ‘crossing over’ from one current stylistic genre to another, in Lichtenstein’s case, from the figurative Pop school to the abstract Minimalist one. This fluidity underscores one problem we have with art historical labels – they tend to pigeonhole people into categories under the assumption that one must be a hedgehog and not a fox when it comes to artistic production (the hedgehog knows one thing really well, the fox knows a bunch of things but none as well as the hedgehog). It’s particularly curious that we laud the idea of pluralism when applied to art and design as a whole, but seem less ready to embrace stylistic diversity when it comes to defining individual artists.

Then again, if one digs deep enough one might find some thematic connections in Lichtenstein’s paintings that tie the two seemingly opposite schools together. For instance, like other Pop artists Lichtenstein took inspiration from the mechanical processes of commercial illustration. Modularity and minimalism have a similar affinity for industrial character, but emphasize its abstract qualities rather than try to bring it into an overtly humanized framework. Lichtenstein seems to want to bridge the gap by using repetitive and abstract forms, but then endowing them with rich, sensuous colors and patterns for the purpose of inducing visual pleasure in the eye of the viewer.

Of course, people like Frank Sella, Ellsworth Kelly and Kenneth Noland had been generously applying color to their Minimalist canvases for some time when Lichtenstein produced his modular series. But Lichtenstein composes his panels with more visual complexity and contrast than his colleagues, many of whose works indicate a reductivist desire to simplify rather than amplify. In one sense, he was taking modular painting in the only direction it could go, if we consider Rauschenberg’s White Painting series of 1951 as the grand-daddy of the multi-panel modular work of art. Devoid of color or content, Rauschenberg’s paintings are the obvious antecedent to and a point of departure for all the modular canvases that came after them.

One quality which the modular pieces we’ve cited so far have in common is a lack of mobility. In other words, all of them are fixed works of art, unchanging and untouchable in their finished state. Other artists, like one of our favorites, Charlotte Posenenske, had already associated modularity with changeability, but she was among the few to incorporate this understanding into her work. Another was Norman Carlberg, a modular artist and sculptor who we will talk about in an upcoming post. Until then, you’ll just have to ponder the possibilities.

References:
The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation Website contains an excellent online illustrated catalogue raisonné of the artist’s works, including the modular series
Charlotte Posenenske