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Review: ‘Roy Lichtenstein: Like New’ makes the same old magnificent
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Source: Washington Square News
Stepping into “Roy Lichtenstein: Like New” felt like entering a world concocted from my feminine misery Pinterest boards. Many of Roy Lichtenstein’s canvas pieces, now shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art in his first New York retrospective since 1993, depict melodramatic, highly stylized illustrations of women weeping. But as I moved deeper into his world, my initial pleasant surprise turned sour. Realizing how much of Lichtenstein’s iconic work was a slightly tweaked copy of an existing advertisement left a bitter taste in my mouth. He has made a career of transforming commercial graphics into high art — but at what point does replication turn monotonous? Lichtenstein, as the wall label describes, was “an appropriation artist long before the term was used by art historians.” His most famous works took inspiration from ’60s comic styles, which he recreated on a larger scale and entirely by hand.
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