One of the refreshing aspect of the Roy Lichtenstein exhibit at the Parrish Art Museum is that the curators haven’t surrounded this period with an aura of destiny
When scholars examine a famous artist’s early work, the temptation is to search for portents—to find in classroom studies any nascent motifs that point to future prowess and foretell mastery as inevitable.
One of the refreshing aspects of “Roy Lichtenstein: History in the Making, 1948-1960” at the Parrish Art Museum is that the curators haven’t surrounded this period with an aura of destiny. One walks through the three rooms and sees the artist testing out a bewildering variety of styles and subjects without ever settling on one.
Until then, as the show succinctly documents, Lichtenstein roamed blithely through the annals of art and illustration. He painted tank-like figures that recall the Surrealism of Max Ernst and the eccentric classicism of John Graham . He made tapered sculptures in wood and metal that invoke African and Northwest American Indian art . He satirized U.S. history painting by flattening the heroic figures of Emanuel Leutze’s panoramic canvas in the manner of Picasso’s “Three Musicians.
Elements of his later style are visible but not yet synthesized. Images of cartoon animals from about 1958—installed in a section of the show titled “Glimmers of Pop”—lack the flat-toned audacity of his post-1960 paintings. A brush-and-ink drawing of a reclining Bugs Bunny renders his buck-toothed head as if he were a hallucination or perhaps one of De Kooning’s “Woman” paintings. Two drawings of Mickey Mouse are more disturbing than droll.