Roy Lichtenstein

Published to accompany a retrospective on this founding practitioner of Pop Art at Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum, this volume traces the development of the artist's unique comic-book style--a style that began in the early 1960s as a deadpan appropriation of mannered, commercial iconography and has since evolved into a versatile, signature style with seemingly endless permutations and possibilities. Profusely illustrated, patterned around themes in Lichtenstein's work and in rough chronological order, the book provides valuable insight into his creative method. Waldman, deputy director of the Guggenheim, explores Lichtenstein's source materials, those images in advertising, comics and consumer iconography that he manipulates into images that are utterly his own. Looking at the ``found'' image alongside Lichtenstein's oil painting, one discerns how the artist distills the image, changing the particular into the archetypal, so that in Girl with Ball (1961), a photograph of a young woman tossing a beachball in an ad for a resort becomes a trope for an advertising-driven, youth-obsessed culture. In several series, Lichtenstein has used the leveling quality of his style to parody the art-making process itself. Most pointedly, in the Brushstroke paintings (1965-1966), his caricatures of dripping, slashing brushstrokes spoof the high drama and inner turmoil of the Abstract Expressionists. (Jan.)