Welcome to Art Angle, an Artnet News podcast that dives into the places where the art world meets the real world, bringing each week’s biggest story to earth. Join us each week for an in-depth look at what matters most in museums, the art market and more, with input from our own writers and editors, as well as artists, curators and diners. other leading experts in the field.
When you hear the name Roy Lichtenstein, an artistic style immediately comes to mind. In the early 1960s, Lichtenstein’s use of comic books as inspiration for his brightly colored Pop Art painting was revolutionary, even shocking.
Today he is one of the most instantly recognizable and well-known painters, and yet, a quarter of a century after his death, the the topic of Roy Lichtenstein source material has unexpectedly become a hot topic again.
In the 1960s, Lichtenstein’s paintings sold for thousands of dollars; in 1995, a few years before his death, his painting Nurse sold at auction for $1.7 million, then in 2015 the same painting was auctioned again, this time for the staggering sum of $95 million, making it one of the most most expensive in the world.
When marketing this sale, auction house Christie’s said that images of Nurse was taken from what he called a “comic romance novel” from the early 1960s. What the auction house didn’t mention is that the actual person who drew the panel original that Lichtenstein used as the source material for this painting was the Golden Age comic book Arthur Petty, and in the comic world, this disrespect for Lichtenstein’s source material is a big, big deal.
In museums, the status of the artist may be indisputable, but the crossover in the parallel universe of comics and the status of Lichtenstein is seen as a symbol of the lack of respect for comics as a form of art. art, and the man himself is considered a thief who has copied hard-working artists without even bothering to mention them by name.
Instead of healing over time, this particular flaw appears to have only worsened as Lichtenstein’s stock soared. Some of the most famous comic voices from Dave Gibbons, the author of the groundbreaking graphic novel watchmen to Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of Mausto Neil Gaiman, author of the legendary comic book series The sand man were all candid, blaming museums for not crediting the unique voices of comic book artists who inspired Roy Lichtenstein.
Roy Lichtenstein’s story of multiple meanings is a story of the shifting relationships between museum art and comic culture, between money, morality and law; and how meaning in art is always in flux. At least that’s a takeaway from the new streaming documentary WHAAM! BLAM! Roy Lichtenstein and the art of appropriation. This week, national art critic Ben Davis sat down with the film’s director, James L. Hussey, to discuss the issues raised.
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