Roy Lichtenstein really annoys me
Many of his most famous paintings were copies -- yes,
copies -- of work done by comic-book artists. These artists were uncredited and unpaid for this plagiarising of thier creations while Lichtenstein gets his copies in the Tate Modern and is called a genius.
And Lichtenstein didn't just copy; he copied cluelessly. He stripped away everything that was vital about the source material. A comic tells a
story. That's the genius of comic-book artists. A point that Lichtenstein's work missed completely.
Jack Kirby drew 5 panels per page, 22 pages per comic, four comics a month, over an 80 year career. Hundreds of thousands of individual pieces of art. Roy Lichtenstein stole a few of them. Hands up who's ever heard of Jack Kirby?
Sorry. Don't mean to denigrate anybody's choice of art, but Lichtenstein really makes me angry.
I'm sorry about that, IRF, but I'm going to have to disagree. I love comic book art, even if I've only started reading them relatively recently (and yes, my hand is up re. Kirby). But to say that Lichtenstein simply copied from Kirby and other comic book artists is not quite true: they're not copies, although several of the early paintings are clearly inspired by particular comic book frames. This influence is pretty widely acknowledged - the recent Lichtenstein exhibition at the Hayward had a cabinet full of the originals Lichtenstein had drawn inspiration from, including the artist's own notebooks, and while there is resemblance, they are not slavish copies. (And to use comic books as an example
against the common sharing of ideas and inspirations doesn't make much sense to me! If copyright and plagiarism were pursued in comics as ruthlessly as you suggest it should be against RL, then the entire industry would have reached artistic paralysis several decades ago, and I'm sure any thoughtful comic artist is well aware of this.)
But I agree that that comes down to a matter of degree, and to how much store one holds for the originality of an artists' conception. Where I will stand up most strongly for Lichtenstein is when you say
And Lichtenstein didn't just copy; he copied cluelessly. He stripped away everything that was vital about the source material. A comic tells a story. That's the genius of comic-book artists. A point that Lichtenstein's work missed completely.
Yes, but - just as a painting is not a comic book, so a comic book is not a painting. By only seeing L's paintings as isolated frames "plagiarised" (your word, not mine) from a comic book, you're missing everything that is vital about painting, a vitality that Lichtenstein pursued throughout his life's work. A painting does much more than tell a story, even if it doesn't even do that; Lichtenstein's work - and this extends far beyond the comic book pieces, which are really just preliminary sketches for a personal style - is about a particular view of reality. That's the genius of painting. He didn't just quote Kirby et al; his output is full of cover versions of Picasso, Pollock, some really neat Monets, himself, etc. It's only one aspect of his work, but to put it simply: he painted paintings in the way that other people paint faces, bowl of fruit, Madonnas, etc.
