BREGENZ, AUSTRIA.- Kunsthaus Bregenz presents Roy Lichtenstein - Classic of the New, on view through September 4, 2005. Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings from the early 1960s become a veritable synonym for American Pop Art. These oversized copies of aspects of quotidian culture, inspired by newspaper ads and comics, have gone down in art history as prototypes of the artist’s fascination with the new link between art and everyday culture. Thus Roy Lichtenstein has become one of the most influential figures in twentieth century post-war American art.

For more than three decades, Roy Lichtenstein (born in 1923 in New York; died in 1997 in New York) managed to stay true to his artistic sources and at the same time to stylistically expand the different thematic groups, to interlink and vary them in multifarious ways. The fact that he once said of himself, “I try to make a commercial Picasso or Mondrian,” clearly sums up the whole range of his artistic intentions. He strove to subject both art historical works, as valuable objects of a high culture, and simple everyday objects, as part of a banalized mass culture, to the same visually striking image strategy. In this way he succeeded in making them a fait accompli, confederates in the quest for the same beauty. Like Picasso, Lichtenstein used the apparent conflict between high and quotidian culture as a stimulating artistic impetus for his work. Thus he produced images of everyday objects, household items from the domestic culture and lifestyle of the normal American citizen. At the same time, Lichtenstein repeatedly paraphrased and reflected on works of classic modernism. With his unmistakable painting style that portrayed everyday objects and original artwork as products of purely mechanical actions, he became the herald of a new, humane perspective of the world and a new classic of the beauty of everyday life.

With 41 works from 1961–1995, the Kunsthaus Bregenz is devoting an extensive exhibition to this all-encompassing idea of a “Classic of the New.” The presentation is divided into three chapters. The first part of the exhibition on the ground floor of the Kunsthaus is dedicated to the early icons of his oeuvre, works with which Lichtenstein established his fundamental vocabulary of a new pictorial language and defined the European and American painting tradition of modernism as an unwavering parameter within his work. The early b/w works from 1961–1965 with their objects, household scenes, and reflections of artwork usher in a new chapter in art.

On the third floor, Lichtenstein’s early work of the 1960s is juxtaposed with his late work, the interiors of the 1990s. The large-format paintings from 1990–1995 represent part of the American everyday culture of that period. Just as the series of countless artist’s studios might continue to be considered the ideal of reflected artistic creation, so too are the interiors perfect reflections of the social clichés of their day and a demonstration of artistic independence. They are the result of both an emotional and a cool and toned-down strategy of image and form. The polychromy of the work group “Interiors” is contrasted with the monochromy of his earlier paintings. At the same time, these paintings seem to bring together the sum of all his previous works as well as to reiterate many earlier pictorial elements.

The second floor is dedicated to the artist’s work of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Tied together under the theme of the female portrait as one of Lichtenstein's favorite motifs, this selection focuses on the famous “girl” paintings of the 1960s and a number of different adaptations of European painting on the same theme. Whereas the works on the first and third floors demonstrate the conceptual logic of a deliberate painting style intent on cultural reconciliation, the second floor mediates between the two, offering a more refined examination of the artistic-sensuous opulence of his work.

With 35 paintings, five collages, and one sculpture – mostly key works from museums and private lenders in Europe and America – this exhibition at the Kunsthaus Bregenz will be one of Austria’s most comprehensive solo shows of the work of one of the heroes and co-founders of Pop Art and certainly one of most influential artists of the late twentieth century. It will also be the first European show to devote itself to the decisive dialogue between the artist’s early and late work with a multifaceted, stunning selection of masterpieces, thus enabling a profound examination of the pictorial language of the new classic of everyday life as juxtaposed with the classical painting motifs of modernism.

For the Kunsthaus Bregenz – which for years has seen itself with its programming as a venue for art and discourse where the current aspect of the work of major contemporary artists plays a decisive role – this first historical look at an important force in contemporary art is a momentous occasion. As an artistic vision, the paradigm shift in art, as it also took place in Roy Lichtenstein’s work, is an impulse for the radical artistic positions presented at the Kunsthaus Bregenz. In particular one program focus of the Kunsthaus can be seen most propitiously in Roy Lichtenstein’s work, namely the theme of the transatlantic dialogue which strongly emphasizes the common roots of European and American art tradition.

The exhibition is being organized in close cooperation with the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, The Estate of the Roy Lichtenstein, New York, and the Sonnabend and Gagosian galleries, New York, as the chief lenders of major work series.


Publication

The exhibition will be accompanied by a comprehensive publication with seminal texts by American and European authors on the main subjects of the exhibition. With color illustrations of all the works on display, supplemented by important comparative illustrations as well as comprehensive image and text material on the artist and his work, it will be a book that will not only address a general public, but will surely prove an important contribution to the current research on Roy Lichtenstein’s work.