Lichtenstein's Theft and the Artists Left Behind 1 1

[jools&jim]

 

Art is either plagiarism or revolution... -- Paul Gauguin

 

[rjpb]

If we're talking about Pollock heres what comic artist Greg Horn thought about his painting. "No.5"

 

Greg Horn-"It’s 1948…artist Jackson Pollock ascends a ladder, and has a diarrhea explosion on a fiberboard canvas… 60 years later, the painting titled “No. 5” sells for $140 million… this should INSPIRE you…just think what YOU could do with a bottle a whiskey, a bean burrito and a ladder."

 

Third rate cheesecake artist says what?

[devilsrain]

If we're talking about Pollock heres what comic artist Greg Horn thought about his painting. "No.5"

 

Greg Horn-"It’s 1948…artist Jackson Pollock ascends a ladder, and has a diarrhea explosion on a fiberboard canvas… 60 years later, the painting titled “No. 5” sells for $140 million… this should INSPIRE you…just think what YOU could do with a bottle a whiskey, a bean burrito and a ladder."

 

Third rate cheesecake artist says what?

 

Greg forgot the cigarettes

[dupont2005]

Whenever Greg Land traces a porno mag...

 

 

No, that's good stuff.

[500Club]

 

So, it's silly to be so upset now, fifty years later because if how things worked out. Heath is near broke NOT because Lichtenstein ripped him off, but because the comics industry did! Never paying enough money so the artists and writers to save up for retirement...

 

(boy, this will get me in trouble)

 

Why haven't these artists made better choices in life, that they are in the predicaments they are at this stage in the game?

 

Bob Kane was an artist. Stan Lee was a writer. Bob Kane died a wealthy man.

 

Stan Lee is worth a fortune.

 

What made those guys succeed, where others have failed? Was Bob Kane special? Is Stan Lee special? Or did they simply make better choices in life?

 

Why are people made to feel sorry for those who had their entire lives to prepare for this time, and did not spend their money wisely?

I'll add on by addressing the comment about never paying enough for artists and writers to save up for retirement. Companies pay what the free market determines is the going rate for a service. If they don't offer enough, no one accepts the work, and the pay rate rises. If they offer an excessive amount, there is competition for the work, theoretically driving the price down.

 

'Those evil companies should have paid more' is just whimsical thinking.

[Logan510]

That anyone would defend his plagiarism...and that's what it is...is sad.

 

Its not plagiarism. Because its big!

 

 

It's not plagiarism because even though he stole another artists work, he made it "important". That is the scam, that is the unfortunate joke that people have bought into for all these years.

[comicwiz]

There are few artists that I dislike so much that I actually feel the need to speak out towards them. Lichtenstein is one of them.

You're missing the main point m'man. It's not about the changes he made, although he did make changes, it's not copying. The point of these works of his, and the Pop Art movement in general, was to take commercial "trashy non-art" and make it art.

 

I think most people get what you're saying, and those running to RL's and post-modernists defence. But I agree with a lot of the points Balls made. Probably because I'm a self-taught artist, with little formal training, and because I had to "sneak" my passion and interests in art because it wasn't something my Dad wanted his Son to pursue as a career.

 

I also can relate to Brian Bolland's point about being a control freak, and not wanting anyone to ink over his pencils, or to colour over his work. I recently did a cover recreation of Howard Chaykins unedited/unaltered cover to Marvel Star Wars #1 because I think what Marvel did to his work when they coloured over it washed out, and to some extent, ruined elements that knocked Chaykin's piece right out of the park. Having an opportunity to redraw those elements, I found a new appreciation for what he was trying to capture in that piece.

 

Part of my problem is that whenever the "pop art" movement is bandied around to defend what RL did, views like mine are relegated to that of a comic fan-boy. Perhaps, that's part of it, but I'm also coming at it from point of view of an artist, and it's one thing for a hack like RL to feel like we care enough about his image juxtaposition to ignore the elements we enjoyed about the original work he swiped. At a rudimentary level, that might be the simplicity of it. It could fall on the mere fact that comics brought the line art to millions of readers to appreciate, and sentimentalize about when they reach an age where they might appreciate the nostalgia as much as the art, rather than having a one-of painted copy hang in some rich persons home. In a nutshell, for me RL's reworking/appropriation leaves me underwhelmed.

 

As a person who appreciates the work of an artist as much as the art they produce for an intended audience or medium, this might all be tolerable if RL didn't take the work, and sold it as his own. Nothing about RL's swiping excuses or changes what he did. Not pop art, Not post-modernism. Not even an army of fine art inhabitants of the galleries that display his work who don't name the artists he stole from, demonstrate/display the original panels he swiped alongside, nor have they ever demonstrated any willingness to set the record straight. This is a crucial aspect that kills any possibility that I could ever enjoy any work he produced.

 

This had to all be kept underground with David's site, and I for one welcome Heath's strip adding a voice to the drumbeat that has worked to drown out the voices/views of people like Balls and those who oppose what RL has gotten away with for too long. I recognize Heath adding his perspective won't change everyone's mind, but to relegate oppositional views as rantings of a "fan-boy" is unfair, especially because it's working to mute the voice of someone who was there when it was happening. To me this level of defensiveness in this new wave of discussion since Heath's strip was released walks and talks like the lie DC recently tried to spread with the "all is good with the Finger family", when that statement couldn't be further from the truth, and I'm glad the Finger family responded the way they did.

[Prince Namor]

The fine art world is a charade. It;s the emperor has no clothes. Any comic artist could paint an extra large painting of one of their panels. There's nothing special about Lichtenstein. Except that everyone in the fine art world has agreed to agree he's special.

 

Even for a laymen, there must be something more special about him, or we wouldn't be talking about it so strongly over 50 years after the point.

His paintings sell for big bucks and I get the feeling kav doesn't like it.

 

And really that's what it's all about isn't it?(Selling for big bucks)

 

Doesn't matter your level of talent - if you can sell it for big bucks, you're an artist.

 

Rob Granito went about it all wrong.

[Speedy-D]

The fine art world is a charade. It;s the emperor has no clothes. Any comic artist could paint an extra large painting of one of their panels. There's nothing special about Lichtenstein. Except that everyone in the fine art world has agreed to agree he's special.

 

Even for a laymen, there must be something more special about him, or we wouldn't be talking about it so strongly over 50 years after the point.

His paintings sell for big bucks and I get the feeling kav doesn't like it.

 

And really that's what it's all about isn't it?(Selling for big bucks)

 

Doesn't matter your level of talent - if you can sell it for big bucks, you're an artist.

 

Rob Granito went about it all wrong.

There is no single thing that "it's all about." Some great art sells for huge money. Some never sells at all. My mother has been an artist all her life. She has shows, sells work, but has never gotten rich off it by any stretch. She is an artist and it's not because of money.

 

What's "great" is up to me, because it's my world. Just like it's up to you, because it's your world. My opinion, just like everyone else's, is determined by my personal tastes, my life experiences, and how I interpret and internalize the tastes of others.

 

Some killer artists are great draftsmen, some don't know how to hold a pencil. Some art is great because of its beauty, some is great because of the ideas behind it, some is great because it moves the medium forward in a new direction. For these reasons, arguments about whether a high school student "could have done it" or "it's just splatter on canvas" are silly and meaningless. It doesn't matter if you went to art school or not, it's a pointless argument.

 

All artists, all of them, draw on the work that came before them, some to a huge extent, some much more subtly.

[delekkerste]

The fine art world is a charade. It;s the emperor has no clothes. Any comic artist could paint an extra large painting of one of their panels. There's nothing special about Lichtenstein. Except that everyone in the fine art world has agreed to agree he's special.

 

Generalize much, Kav? Yes, a lot of Modern and Contemporary Art pushed the boundaries of what is accepted as art. A lot of it is not very good. But a lot of it is good and some of it is very, very good. A lot of comic art is not very good, for that matter, and I think most "fine art" attempts by comic artists that gets the fanboys all hot and bothered is mostly unoriginal, uninspired and generally pretty bad. Most comic people unfortunately see the fine art world through their comic collector x-ray specs (often without any serious education or investigation into it) which hopelessly clouds their judgment.

 

 

No-we're talking about him because the fine art world gave him the stamp of approval so he went in the annals of history as a fine artist. Just like the guy who did pee Christ and the guy who did the blank white canvas.

 

The fine art world eventually gave him the stamp of approval. It's not like he was on the art establishment's fast track - he was almost 40 before he tasted any success and spent many years experimenting with Expressionism and Abstract Expressionism and even becoming an art professor for a number of years before he helped pioneer Pop Art.

 

 

Common sense makes me an arbiter of taste.

A crucifix in a jar of urine is not art

It's not rocket science.

Any 15 year old can be taught how to transfer a comic panel to a large canvas. There is no special skill required.

 

The source material that was transferred is the least interesting part of RL's paintings. He appropriated one throwaway panel from a book, representing less than 1% of the whole, featuring no recognizable characters and displaying generic or mundane settings found in a typical war or romance comic. This is a panel for which the artist maybe received a buck or two for drawing if he was lucky, and would have been forgotten the month after being published had Lichtenstein not done something with it.

 

Few would have cared about someone who just blew up and reproduced individual panels from a nondescript comic book line-by-line (though, at the time, that would have been interesting). But, that's not just what RL did. He took a throwaway panel, replaced the drab colors and blew it up as if it had been created for commercial printing, replacing lines with dots and emphasizing different aspects of the art. He imbued that throwaway panel with a new and different narrative, being removed from a child's comic book and placed into a gallery setting, often with the text being revised or omitted. I assure you that, "Why Brad, darling, this painting is a Masterpiece! My, soon you'll have all of New York clamoring for your work!" was not part of the original comic and that the bland, appropriated source material is the least interesting part of the painting.

 

The result is something very special - there's a reason why hundreds of thousands of everyday Janes and Joes went to see the Lichtenstein retrospective in Chicago, D.C. and London in 2012-13 and enjoyed it. Many people may not be able to relate to a monochromatic canvas, but everybody can relate to one of Lichtenstein's comic paintings. That's why they became so popular, not because they was so esoteric and opaque that they could only be understood by the cognoscenti. It was the very opposite of the controversial art that you are railing against that the average Joe worries is a scam being put over on them.

 

I mean, sure, it may have been controversial 50 years ago when no one had done it before, but, now, it doesn't get any easier to understand and appreciate when it comes to Modern/Contemporary art than a Lichtenstein comic painting. It looks good, is clever and witty, and presents beautifully in person - all things that Joe Sixpack can easily understand.

[delekkerste]

BTW, Kav, if you think the fine art world is all a charade, what kind of art would you like to see being produced instead? Maybe artists should stick to portraits, landscapes and religious and generic genre scenes for paintings and all sculpture should be made out of marble in the classical style? Maybe the world needs some portraits of Taylor Swift and Mark Zuckerberg and still-lifes of the iPhone 6 and MacBook Air instead of people pushing the boundaries as they have been?

 

We've debated RL and fine art in general to death in both the OA Forum and The Water Cooler. It's very obvious that most comic fans' artistic tastes are mired somewhere in the 19th century, with many believing art went off the rails after it stopped being about figurative representation. And that, to me, is just sad.

[delekkerste]

If we're talking about Pollock heres what comic artist Greg Horn thought about his painting. "No.5"

 

Greg Horn-"It’s 1948…artist Jackson Pollock ascends a ladder, and has a diarrhea explosion on a fiberboard canvas… 60 years later, the painting titled “No. 5” sells for $140 million… this should INSPIRE you…just think what YOU could do with a bottle a whiskey, a bean burrito and a ladder."

 

Third rate cheesecake artist says what?

 

Yeah, I don't mind Greg Horn (I own the original of his best-ever comic work, the Elektra v. 2 #3 cover), but anyone who brings him into a debate about Modern Art has already lost.

 

Pollock's work is mesmerizing and brilliant. No surprise that people who don't care for Lichtenstein generally don't care for him either (not to mention Rothko, Johns, Rauschenberg, Bacon, de Kooning, Warhol, Basquiat, or most of the titans of 20th century art). If it's not easily understandable and doesn't make a good dorm room poster freshman year of college (re: Salvador Dali, MC Escher and maybe Picasso), your average Comic Book Guy doesn't care for 20th century art that came after the Impressionists - it's all just a scam perpetrated by the art world elites on the elites with money, at the expense of the common sense of everyone else.

[delekkerste]

"Great Art" thread in The Water Cooler

[rjpb]

If we're talking about Pollock heres what comic artist Greg Horn thought about his painting. "No.5"

 

Greg Horn-"It’s 1948…artist Jackson Pollock ascends a ladder, and has a diarrhea explosion on a fiberboard canvas… 60 years later, the painting titled “No. 5” sells for $140 million… this should INSPIRE you…just think what YOU could do with a bottle a whiskey, a bean burrito and a ladder."

 

Third rate cheesecake artist says what?

 

Yeah, I don't mind Greg Horn (I own the original of his best-ever comic work, the Elektra v. 2 #3 cover), but anyone who brings him into a debate about Modern Art has already lost.

 

Pollock's work is mesmerizing and brilliant. No surprise that people who don't care for Lichtenstein generally don't care for him either (not to mention Rothko, Johns, Rauschenberg, Bacon, de Kooning, Warhol, Basquiat, or most of the titans of 20th century art). If it's not easily understandable and doesn't make a good dorm room poster freshman year of college (re: Salvador Dali and maybe Picasso), your average Comic Book Guy doesn't care for 20th century art that came after the Impressionists - it's all just a scam perpetrated by the art world elites on the elites with money, at the expense of the common sense of everyone else.

 

Thanks for leaving Jeff Koons off your list. I'm tempted to jump onto the "it's all a scam" bandwagon every time I see his work.

[revat]

Here's where I'm at:

 

Art and rights to the art were owned by DC at the time. AT the of the public 'release/sale' of the 'new' art, DC PROBABLY could have made a case to sue for some type of moneys. BUT that wasn't common back then, and the amount of money probably wasn't worth it, so DC made a business decision not to. AND when this piece eventually got famous, there was either a statute of limitations issue, and/or the lawyers thought it would look like just a cash grab if they went to court (e.g. Why didn't they sue earlier [see Kirby's]?)

THIS is not uncommon in comics or in business in general.

 

But for an artist to not credit another artist with obviously derived source material...that's tougher to take, but I don't know how things were done at the time, except that there was a high likelihood that many artists were commonly under the influence of controlled substances.

[500Club]

We've debated RL and fine art in general to death in both the OA Forum and The Water Cooler. It's very obvious that most comic fans' artistic tastes are mired somewhere in the 19th century, with many believing art went off the rails after it stopped being about figurative representation. And that, to me, is just sad.

That's me.

 

Man of pedestrian art tastes. I'm comfortable with that. Many of the examples of 'fine art', such as the ones kav gave, are just nonsense to me, and makes me wonder if the accumulation of enough money anaesthetizes one's tastes.

[Logan510]

We've debated RL and fine art in general to death in both the OA Forum and The Water Cooler. It's very obvious that most comic fans' artistic tastes are mired somewhere in the 19th century, with many believing art went off the rails after it stopped being about figurative representation. And that, to me, is just sad.

That's me.

 

Man of pedestrian art tastes. I'm comfortable with that. Many of the examples of 'fine art', such as the ones kav gave, are just nonsense to me, and makes me wonder if the accumulation of enough money anaesthetizes one's tastes.

 

 

I would just like someone to explain to me how Pollock and Lichtenstein are brilliant. One is a plagiarist and the other is possibly the greatest artistic sham of the last half century.

 

 

[delekkerste]

I would just like someone to explain to me how Pollock and Lichtenstein are brilliant. One is a plagiarist and the other is possibly the greatest artistic sham of the last half century.

 

Better yet, why do you tell us what kind of art you think is brilliant? I'd be especially interested if you like any art from the second half of the 20th century or if you think it's all a sham. I'd like to know what artistic qualities you hold in high regard. My guess would be they're the same qualities that can be replicated by any half-decent Chinese or Vietnamese back-alley copyist for a hundred bucks.

 

Here's what I wrote about Pollock in the Great Art Thread in the Water Cooler:

 

Figurative representation, taken to the extreme by the hyper-realists, is not the height of artistic expression. Would the art world really have been better served if it had never branched off into abstraction and people were still only doing portraits and still-lifes and landscapes? To say that "my kid could do what Pollock did", as some do, or ask what the point of it is really misses the point.

 

The point is that Pollock and others who led the revolution in Abstract Expressionism broke new ground in determining what art could be. This group of artists put New York City on the map as a leading art capital and arguably influenced nearly every artist that followed by firmly breaking away from realistic representation (not that they were the first, as various European movements had started to do so starting with the Impressionists). Doing so also represented a complete rebellion against established artistic norms and traditions and thus often conveyed themes of anarchy, disorder and nihilism even without portrayals of figures. In developing his own style, Pollock also revolutionized painting technique - just think about what painters had been doing for centuries versus how Pollock created his paintings.

 

So, no, it's not just about talent, representation or even just passion. It's about challenging established norms and changing what billions of people in generations who followed think about what art is and can be. It's about innovation. It's about intellectual revolution. It's about cultural impact. It's about changing the course of history. Jackson Pollock did it. Hilo Chen...not so much.

 

I might also add that most abstract artists went to art schools and were trained in classical drawing and can probably draw/paint figurative representations as well as most commercial illustrators and comic book artists. Being reasonably involved in the art world, including serving on one of the acquisitions committees at the Guggenheim Museum, I have come across ample evidence in my experience of this.

[namisgr]

That anyone would defend his plagiarism...and that's what it is...is sad.

 

Its not plagiarism. Because its big!

 

According to the sarcasm herein, the 'designer' of the Campbell's soup can needs attribution. Moreover, some here appear to be arguing the 'designer' deserves wealth also.

 

Turning 'throwaway pieces or designs' into something that transcends the original form takes more than changing something's size.

[Logan510]

I would just like someone to explain to me how Pollock and Lichtenstein are brilliant. One is a plagiarist and the other is possibly the greatest artistic sham of the last half century.

 

Better yet, why do you tell us what kind of art you think is brilliant? I'd be especially interested if you like any art from the second half of the 20th century or if you think it's all a sham. I'd like to know what artistic qualities you hold in high regard. My guess would be they're the same qualities that can be replicated by any half-decent Chinese or Vietnamese back-alley copyist for a hundred bucks.

 

Here's what I wrote about Pollock in the Great Art Thread in the Water Cooler:

 

Figurative representation, taken to the extreme by the hyper-realists, is not the height of artistic expression. Would the art world really have been better served if it had never branched off into abstraction and people were still only doing portraits and still-lifes and landscapes? To say that "my kid could do what Pollock did", as some do, or ask what the point of it is really misses the point.

 

The point is that Pollock and others who led the revolution in Abstract Expressionism broke new ground in determining what art could be. This group of artists put New York City on the map as a leading art capital and arguably influenced nearly every artist that followed by firmly breaking away from realistic representation (not that they were the first, as various European movements had started to do so starting with the Impressionists). Doing so also represented a complete rebellion against established artistic norms and traditions and thus often conveyed themes of anarchy, disorder and nihilism even without portrayals of figures. In developing his own style, Pollock also revolutionized painting technique - just think about what painters had been doing for centuries versus how Pollock created his paintings.

 

So, no, it's not just about talent, representation or even just passion. It's about challenging established norms and changing what billions of people in generations who followed think about what art is and can be. It's about innovation. It's about intellectual revolution. It's about cultural impact. It's about changing the course of history. Jackson Pollock did it. Hilo Chen...not so much.

 

I might also add that most abstract artists went to art schools and were trained in classical drawing and can probably draw/paint figurative representations as well as most commercial illustrators and comic book artists. Being reasonably involved in the art world, including serving on one of the acquisitions committees at the Guggenheim Museum, I have come across ample evidence in my experience of this.

 

Were you one of my instructors at the Art Institute? I didn't swallow it then sir and I'm not swallowing it now.