Flowers

Roy Lichtenstein’s Flowers from 1981 astutely demonstrates the Pop artist’s interest in, and reverence for, art history. Along with Andy Warhol, Lichtenstein championed one of the twentieth century’s most distinctive art movements, yet he also spent much of his career pursuing a serious examination of how people view and comprehend images. In the present work, he takes two of art history’s most important genres—the still life and abstraction—and combines them into one dynamic painting. Lichtenstein represents the bold, gestural brushstrokes of the Abstract Expressionist painters in his characteristic Pop Art style. Colorful and bold brushstrokes traverse the canvas, mapping out the image of a vase of flowers. Here, Lichtenstein is at his most insightful, producing an amalgam of two seemingly diametrically opposed postwar American art movements. Flowers demonstrates both his intellectual as well as aesthetic interest in art, and stands as a testament to the unbridled creative impulse and sharp intellect behind the works of one of the most important figures in the American postwar canon.

The strongly gestural brushstrokes depicted in Flowers move around the painting’s canvas with a determined sense of purpose, a boldly passionate testament to the expressive will of an action painter in the vein of Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. Long, fluid lines frame the edges of the painting, while shorter bursts of color provide detail and a sense of frenetic movement. The color of each brushstroke is clearly delineated, fully and flatly embodying a single shade of color, as if it were in fact a commercial illustration or reproduction of a brushstroke. The tonal palette in the present work is both bold and fauve-like, with the dominant yellow hue, interspersed with touches of green, red, and black, creating a vibrant yet controlled energy. Lichtenstein’s decision to avoid shading and gradients highlights the flatness of the composition, a technique reminiscent of his comic-strip influences, where areas of color do not aim to mimic reality but instead create a simplified, graphic effect. Flowers does not aim to depict a series of brushstrokes per se; instead, Lichtenstein aims to depict the representation of brushstrokes. At first, the viewer might perceive Flowers as a totally abstract work, where Lichtenstein’s only subject is abstract painting itself. However, after a closer look, a composition begins to rise out of the gestural abstraction – a clearly portrayed vase containing the titular flowers arises at the center of the painting, delineated by a few simple brushstrokes. The deliberate, almost mechanical execution of these bold lines contrasts with the domestic subject matter, resulting in a sense of artificiality that reflects Lichtenstein’s Pop Art sensibilities. The primary subject of Flowers is not abstract painting writ large – Flowers is a uniquely postmodern still-life painting, one that combines Pop Art, Abstract Expressionism, and still-life art all at once.

Roy Lichtenstein spent much of his career examining the tropes of art history; from Cubism to Expressionism and from Surrealism to Abstraction he deconstructed the different techniques of painting only to regenerate them in new and different ways. Starting in the early 1960s, he arrived at the signature style that would bring him international fame and renown. Lichtenstein began painting works that appropriated mass-produced images from popular comic books and supermarket romance novels. Lichtenstein’s most iconic paintings, including Look Mickey (1961), Drowning Girl (1963), and Whaam! (1963) feature cartoon text bubbles, the Ben Day dots of comic-book printing, and figures from comic books. While Flowers is executed in a style akin to that of those early 1960s paintings, its subject matter is rather different. It is part of Lichtenstein’s celebrated Brushstrokes series, where the artist changes his subject to art history itself. The Brushstrokes paintings depict the gestural expressions of the brushstroke itself, some simply portraying a single, bold, totemic brushstroke. By sifting the signature technique of the New York School through a filter of Ben Day dots and an exaggeratedly cartoonish style, Lichtenstein’s Brushstrokes examined composition and design over the heightened action and emotion of American abstract painters.

“[I]t’s taking something that originally was supposed to mean immediacy and I’m tediously drawing something that looks like a brushstroke... I want it to look as though it were painstaking. It’s a picture of a picture and it’s a misconstrued picture of a picture.Roy Lichtenstein” (J. Rondeau & S. Wagstaff, Roy Lichtenstein, exh. cat., Art Institute of Chicago, New Haven & London, 2012, p. 50).

In a 2001 essay about the Brushstroke paintings, American art critic Dave Hickey writes that the series “delivered the effect of high-style American painting coolly through efficacious means, and, in the process, delivered American art from the tyranny of anxious execution and difficult means – from the assumption of psychological dysfunction and tragic destiny that had pervaded postwar practice” (D. Hickey, “Brushstrokes,” Roy Lichtenstein - Brushstrokes: Four Decades, New York, 2001, pg. 10) In Flowers, Roy Lichtenstein demonstrates the continued evolution of his practice, applying his signature Pop Art technique to a different series of subjects – the bold gestures of the Abstract Expressionist art and a universal still life. While earlier works like Look Mickey and Whaam! focused on comic-book characters and narratives, Flowers and his Brushstroke series tackle the process of painting itself, reducing expressionist gestures to graphic, mechanical forms. By distilling the intensity of the Abstract Expressionist brushstroke into cold, calculated marks, Lichtenstein parodies the emotional spontaneity associated with postwar American painting, replacing it with a playful yet deliberate reflection on the construction of art and the painter’s tools.