To make a brushstroke look like a brushstroke

Roy Lichtenstein’s visual vocabulary of black outlines, block colour and Ben Day dots is well known — it was a style derived from commercial printing techniques and the distinct look of American comic books. But before his iconic Pop Art, Lichtenstein painted in the style of the Abstract Expressionists: from 1957 to 1960, he abandoned figuration to create large, colourful and patterned work, often using his shirt sleeve to push paint across the canvas in a broad gestural stroke. Working in Ohio at the time, Lichtenstein recalled that when he adopted this style:

The expressive fingerprint and emotive energetic sweep of these marks were the antithesis of what he would soon become famous for. It was in 1961, beckoned by his son to paint a panel from a comic strip, that Lichtenstein stumbled upon a cool, kitsch and commercial style that would propel him to Pop Art fame.

There was, however, a period of symbiosis right before this breakthrough, where both cartoon figures and abstract, expressive marks occupied the same sheet. Sketches from 1958 of characters such as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck rendered in expressive India Ink on paper show that Lichtenstein had begun to intuit the significance of commercial and pop culture visuals. Appropriation of cheap print material had begun to hold the same allure for Lichtenstein as the ‘high art’ of Abstract Expressionism, dissolving the boundaries of what was considered tasteful at the time.

Lichtenstein often mused that his affinity with commercial and comic images could have stemmed from his service in World War II, where, as an orderly to a Major General, he would be given the task of copying and enlarging Bill Maudlin cartoons from the army newspaper Stars and Stripes to decorate the officer’s quarters.² Or that, living in Ohio after the war, his exposure to the exciting wave of post-war art from New York was largely through magazine reproductions. Lichtenstein reflected in a lecture in 1964 that there seemed ‘to have been some critical point demanding expression which brought [the first Pop artists] to depart from whatever directions [they] were pursuing and to move toward some comment involving the commercial aspect of our environment’.³ The critical point may have been, Lichtenstein speculated, that commercial art glorified ‘things’—usually products — whereas Abstract Expressionism focused on surface, or as he put it:

When Lichtenstein abandoned his Abstract Expressionist style in 1961, he instead began producing paintings such as Kitchen range 1961–62, adapted from a black and white advertisement for Signature brand ovens. The depiction was cool, restrained and almost mechanical. He began to refer to this newfound style as ‘a kind of straight-jacket’⁵ — a set of rules that governed how he made work—which standardised his chosen subjects and reflected the increasingly commercial post-war United States.

Extending this notion, Lichtenstein began to imitate works of fine art. The National Gallery of Australia’s Kenneth Tyler Collection includes works from his 1969 Haystack series, a wry reimagining of the subtle and beautiful colours of Claude Monet’s haystack paintings from 1890 as flat, two-tone print masterpieces.

Lichtenstein’s ‘straight-jacket’ was the limitation of half-tone printing, primarily the Ben Day dot, which economically captures what should be subtle gradations in contrast and colour. He relished exploring the limits of what this visual vocabulary could achieve, and revelled in capturing ephemeral phenomena such as the sun setting over water or light from a lamp in motion lines and hatching—a modern shorthand for energy and movement.

But of these representational challenges, Lichtenstein particularly loved depicting paint itself. For example, Brushstrokes, a colour screen-print from 1967, depicts a cartoon gestural stroke—the type of painterly mark that was the authentic and emotive sign of Abstract Expressionism. Suspended over a ground of blue half-tone dots, the slashed and dripped brushstrokes parody the serious pursuits of the previous generation of American artists. Lichtenstein may have also been poking fun at his own Abstract Expressionist paintings of the previous decade, as he mused that his drips would have to ‘look like drops of water drawn by a commercial artist’.⁶

Later, in 1982, Lichtenstein loosened his straight-jacket by reintroducing into his work the ‘real’ brushstroke that he had abandoned decades earlier. In Abstract Expressionism, the gestural brushstroke was made automatically and was an expression of the subconscious, but in Lichtenstein’s work these sat side-by-side with cartoon brushstrokes, blurring notions of authenticity and the division of high and low art. Lichtenstein made clear in a 1986 interview that ‘everything is a brushstroke…That’s the idea. It gives me a certain freedom’.⁷

Master printmaker Kenneth Tyler, who worked with Lichtenstein throughout his career, recalled that Lichtenstein always ‘questioned what a mark was. He did that a lot. He did that at conversations at dinner, he did that in conversations in the studio’.⁸ This questioning was taken to a new level with the 1992 Reflections series produced at Tyler Graphics, where each print is contained within a printed ‘frame’ and is obscured by a cartoonish emulation of a reflection on glass. Lichtenstein came to this idea after he tried photographing an artwork in Florida that had ‘this terrific glare on it, through the window…Then I thought it’s a good idea for paintings—it’s an excuse to do almost anything’.⁹

The work Reflections on Brushstrokes 1990 is an examination of the fetishized Abstract Expressionist masterpiece. By presenting this work as framed and behind glass, Lichtenstein has depicted the artwork as a desirable commodity, albeit one obscured by a cartoon glare. Footage in the Kenneth Tyler Collection of Lichtenstein at work on this project reveals that his gestural brushstrokes are not what they seem. These are not quick, frenzied marks, but instead are a composite, as Lichtenstein remarks on camera:

This alignment and registration of three different printing plates with three different gestural marks to create one final Abstract Expressionist mark demonstrate that Lichtenstein sought an industrial precision, even when it came to the idea of the Abstract Expressionist masterpiece. Kenneth Tyler recalled that ‘instead of using a brush he started using rags saturated with pigment…the rag would produce beautiful subtle greys and solid blacks’, and that while they were proofing this work, he would beckon the printmakers to ‘make it look more mechanical, make it look more industrial’.¹¹

This approach restates Lichtenstein’s philosophy that commercialism and its veneration of the ‘thing’, or product, had eclipsed the Abstract Expressionist search for the unconscious and therefore authentic and unique expressive form. Reflections on Brushstrokes puts these marks under glass, relegating this style—which was once a part of his own practice—to a museum piece, reproduced in an edition of 68 prints.