What Did Roy Lichtenstein Ever Do for Us?

'I am become death, destroyer of worlds' said Robert Oppenheimer, quoting the Bhagavad Gita, after witnessing the first successful detonation of the atomic bomb he helped design.

Did Roy Lichtenstein ever look at the art that came in his wake, at the dross that his revolutionary take on Pop art helped usher in, and think: Good God, what have I done? I am become pop, destroyer of art?

As the Whitney prepares to open a major retrospective of Lichtenstein’s work, it feels like the right time to ask: what did Roy Lichtenstein ever do for us? Was he an ordinary thief? Did he help set in motion the dumbing down of culture? Or was he just a radical artist doing what radical artists do best: changing the way we see our world?

The spiel is simple with Lichtenstein, partly because the work is so easily and intentionally legible, and partly because his vernacular crossed so successfully into the mainstream: during the 1960s, Roy Lichtenstein took imagery from comic books and newspapers, blew it up to massive proportions and painted it on canvas with his signature dots. Simple. He was an appropriator, a magpie, taking everyday pop-cultural material and dragging it into the world of fine art.

Roy Lichtenstein, 'Bellagio Hotel Mural: Interior with Painting of Reclining Nude' (Study, 1997) Photo: Courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Estate of Roy Lichtenstein

In the process, he made viewers think about ideas of high and low culture, about which images get disseminated and why, about which images have value and which don’t. His whole oeuvre was about asking, in his words, ‘Why are these few marks art and these few marks not art?’ He found that line and trampled on it, kicking down barriers of accessibility in the process and making people feel that art could be for them, not just for some educated elite.

He wasn’t some young wunderkind breaking things for the sake of it. In 1961, he was 37 years old, teaching at Rutgers University, and had already been through the wringer of Abstract Expressionism. Lichtenstein’s simplified Pop aesthetic was reached through years of refinement and conceptual rigour.

Arguably, without him we would have no Koons, no Hirst, no Michael Craig-Martin, no Richard Prince, no Banksy. Prince said, ‘He completely changed the grammar of how we look at images.’ Koons said, ‘Roy’s work is the embrace of the everyday. It really showed everyone that we didn’t have to be intimidated by art.’

But the artists who came in his wake, those Hirsts and Princes, are among the most contentious, divisive, controversial and often outright despised artists of their generations. Sometimes with good reason.

And those are the ones who made it, who got famous and had an impact – they’re the good ones, really. Lichtenstein’s influence reaches way beyond them, out into a murk of artists who totally miss his point. So many people saw what Lichtenstein did and thought the main takeaway was that you can just steal imagery, replicate and copy and appropriate, reduce and simplify, and hey presto, you’re an artist.

Roy Lichtenstein, 'Reclining Nude I, Aurora' (Study, 1997). Photo: Courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Roy Lichtenstein Estate

But at his core, Lichtenstein was a painter. Those Ben-Day dots are hand-painted and meticulous; they’re modern updates to the grids of Mondrian. They are obsessive and dedicated acts of painterly intricacy. If all you take from that is ‘I can steal anything I want and put it in a gallery’, you’ve missed the real beauty of Lichtenstein.

It’s like what happened in modernist architecture. The likes of Le Corbusier and Ernő Goldfinger designed tower blocks as utopian ideals of modern living: places where communities could flourish, grow and live their best lives. Written into every high-ceilinged apartment, every angular concrete stairwell, were the hopes of people who wanted to make a better world. But architects and developers in the following decades saw in their simplified, stark approach an opportunity to cut costs and shove as many people into cheap concrete hovels as they could. They missed the point, the beauty, the idealism and the hope.

That’s what happened to Roy. Artists saw his appropriation, his simplification, his directness, and thought, yeah, I’ll have a bit of that, but I won’t bother with any of the actual art of it.

Roy Lichtenstein, Interior with Chair, 1997, from the portfolio Leo Castelli 90th Birthday Portfolio. Photo: Courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Estate of Roy Lichtenstein

Outside of his influence on art, Lichtenstein is largely a victim of his own success. When an artist’s aesthetic is so clear, so unique, so recognisable that you can spot it a mile off – when it gets printed on T-shirts and key rings and whacked on posters in bedrooms around the world – it stops belonging to the world of art and instead seeps into wider popular culture. It just becomes stuff, and stuff is dismissible, because there’s so much of it. The artist Alex Da Corte, who has co-curated this show, says, ‘In its breadth and impact, Lichtenstein’s work is both inescapable and invisible.’

The Whitney exhibition wants to see Lichtenstein through a modern lens, to put him in the context of ‘an era when pictures are endlessly generated, copied, altered, filtered and reposted across screens’. Lichtenstein was a sage, a seer, a precog: he predicted and predated the modern world by decades. But I think Roy would have despaired at what’s happened to imagery in the contemporary era.

His work is about the power of everyday images, about how they can be exalted and venerated. But we live in an era when images mean less than ever, when they can be twisted, manipulated, denigrated and devalued, when AI, Photoshop and meme-ification have destroyed their value. We are post-truth, post-reality, and images are a victim of that societal shift. We probably need Lichtenstein more than ever, really.