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Post by codystarbuck on Jan 11, 2018 2:50:21 GMT -5
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Post by EdoBosnar on Jan 11, 2018 6:06:56 GMT -5
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Post by kirby101 on Jan 11, 2018 8:19:16 GMT -5
I have to disagree about Sharon Moody. She is not just copying comic art. These are incredibly realistic still lifes of pop culture items. This whole image is a painting.  To dismiss this as plagiarism is ignoring the whole genre of still life paintings of common objects. |
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Jan 11, 2018 10:43:53 GMT -5
I have to disagree about Sharon Moody. She is not just copying comic art. These are incredibly realistic still lifes of pop culture items. This whole image is a painting. To dismiss this as plagiarism is ignoring the whole genre of still life paintings of common objects. It's not dismissing still-lifes. It may be recognizing that nobody previously spent time drawing the fruit or the flowers or what have you. Moody's piece is less a still-life and more a painting of an already existing still-life. |
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Post by EdoBosnar on Jan 11, 2018 11:24:18 GMT -5
"Moody's piece is less a still-life and more a painting of an already existing still-life."
Precisely.
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Post by rberman on Jan 11, 2018 14:12:54 GMT -5
For most of human recorded history, visual art was largely about technique, often in particular about the quest for photorealism, often funded by wealth patrons who enjoyed the though of seeing themselves immortalized on canvas. The invention of photography in the 19th century kicked the legs out from underneath the art world, which then cast about for other interesting things to do with paint. One direction in which art grew subsequently was in the area of concept rather than technique. So Lichenstein gets credit for exhibiting "low art" (comics panels) in a context reserved for "high art," and anyone who challenges him finds difficulty in finding a consistent argument to use. Or Warhol's work with consumer items. or Duchamp exhibiting a urinal made in a ceramics plant. It's in the same spirit as John Cage's musical composition 4'33" which suggests that an invitation to listen to audience room noise still fits the definition of "music." And so on. All of these works did infuriate people. They invited discussion and controversy, which is precisely what artists seek to do. The value in their work lies not in the execution of the underlying composition (e.g. the craft of the artist who did the romance comic panels in the first place) but rather in the concept of recontextualizing it. Those Sharon Moody paintings look amazing. I would buy one! |
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Confessor
CCF Mod Squad
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Post by Confessor on Jan 11, 2018 14:30:01 GMT -5
I like Roy Lichtenstein's work a lot -- and not just because of it's obvious comic book associations. In fact, let's be clear that Lichtenstein actually did a lot more stuff than just the Pop Art comic book homages/parodies that he's best known for. He's far from being an artistic one trick pony.
But to keep our focus on Lichtenstein's comic book derived work, his appropriation of comic book panels doesn't make him a "swipe artist", to quote codystarbuck. The reasons for that are, a) the type of artistic appropriation that Lichtenstein dabbled in was almost completely unheard of at the time and, therefore, the revolutionary originality of the concept trumps any concerns about plagiarism in my view, and b) Roy regarded the essence of Pop Art as being an attempt to create industrial, mass-produced and wholly unoriginal art anyway. In this respect he shared much in common with Andy Warhol, of course, who even went as far as calling his studio "The Factory", just to ram the point home.
So, these comic-inspired paintings -- and let's be clear about this, they aren't exact copies of the comic panels themselves, despite initial appearances -- were Lichtenstein's attempt at commenting on disposable, early '60s consumerist culture, by taking the everyday objects of modern life (like mass produced comic books, for example) and putting them up on the gallery wall. Same goes for Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes or paintings of cans of Campbell's soup. A painting like Whaam! is art precisely because Lichtenstein says it is art. That was the essence of the Pop Art revolution and is probably the entire movement's most precious legacy today.
I presume that this desire to comment on our disposable, consumerist society was also why Lichtenstein didn't bother to give credit to the likes of Irv Novick: the anonymity of the builders of our brave new, mass-produced, consumerist world, as he saw it (in this case, comic book artists...but it could've just as easily been transistor radio designers), were completely unknown to the general public. That was intrinsic to the artistic point he was making. To again strike a parallel with Andy Warhol, it's why Warhol never credited the graphic designer who came up with the packaging for those soup cans or Brillo boxes.
In this forum we might put value on which artist drew what in old comic books, but your average man in the street in the '50s and '60s sure as hell didn't. They were just throw-away entertainment for his kid. Even in these enlightened days, when the notion of comic books having any artistic or literary merit is fairly commonplace, an awful lot of folks out there still regard them as worthless kids stuff.
Also, I believe I'm right in saying that the likes of Lichtenstein's Whaam! and Drowning Girl were something of an attack against the over-earnest abstract impressionist movement of the day. So, there's that.
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Post by Duragizer on Jan 11, 2018 17:11:21 GMT -5
The fact that he got rich while these guys got page rate burns me more than how Siegel and Schuster got taken. This is my essentially my biggest beef with Lichtenstein. I don't much care that he swiped from other artists — imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and all that jazz — but I do care about how he got famous off the work of those artists without so much as giving them credit. |
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Post by Cei-U! on Jan 11, 2018 17:45:16 GMT -5
Doesn't matter how many excuses you make for him, Roy Lichtenstein was a thief and a con man hiding behind a b.s. rationalization. He could easily have made similar paintings in that style without directly copying the work of others. Screw him and every wealthy idiot who rewarded him for his larceny.
Cei-U!
I summon an opinion that wasn't terribly popular when I expressed it at the UW School of Art forty years ago!
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Post by MDG on Jan 11, 2018 17:55:22 GMT -5
The fact that he got rich while these guys got page rate burns me more than how Siegel and Schuster got taken. This is my essentially my biggest beef with Lichtenstein. I don't much care that he swiped from other artists — imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and all that jazz — but I do care about how he got famous off the work of those artists without so much as giving them credit. I don't know how many people in 1960 would have thought of "large-format paintings of comic book panels" as a sure way to get rich and famous. Also, at the time, I'm not sure how easy it was for someone not in the business to figure out who drew a story. The thing I find hardest to believe in this strip is that "strip" guys would be able to ID comic book artists' work in Lichtenstein's stripped-down style.   |
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Post by Rob Allen on Jan 11, 2018 18:12:00 GMT -5
I recall reading that when Lichtenstein was in the Army, he was assigned to a unit that did art for some military publication. His immediate superior was Sgt. Irv Novick.
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Post by codystarbuck on Jan 11, 2018 18:33:11 GMT -5
I recall reading that when Lichtenstein was in the Army, he was assigned to a unit that did art for some military publication. His immediate superior was Sgt. Irv Novick. Between the Panels had a quote from Novick about finding Lichtenstein in the barracks, in tears, about never making it as an artist. It sounded like what we in the Navy called a "sea story;" but, who knows? Call me old fashioned; but, Modern Art doesn't do much for me, and especially "pop art." So much of it, to me, came across as a better line of BS than any real artistic merit. My personal tastes tend to artists who are storytellers, which is part of why I love cartoonists and comic artists; but, also why I love the great magazine and book illustrators; guys like NC Wyeth, Maxfield Parrish, Howard Pyle, Dean Cornwell, Robert McGinnis, Frazetta, Remington, Earl Norem, Virgil Finlay, etc, etc..... The Warhols and Lichtensteins of the world have me waiting for the punch line. Really, it's less the Modern Artists themselves than the "art world," that irks me. One of the best skewerings of it was an episode of Tom Hank's old tv show, Bosom Buddies. His character takes part in a gallery showing and finds his work underappreciated by a rather pompous crowd. he asks one observer about a piece that consists of a red dot on a field of pure white. The critic is going on about the statement on isolation and other stuff and Hanks rants, "It's the flag of Japan!!!" Bill Watterson poked fun at the art criticism world well...  |
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Post by kirby101 on Jan 11, 2018 18:48:36 GMT -5
I have to disagree about Sharon Moody. She is not just copying comic art. These are incredibly realistic still lifes of pop culture items. This whole image is a painting. To dismiss this as plagiarism is ignoring the whole genre of still life paintings of common objects. It's not dismissing still-lifes. It may be recognizing that nobody previously spent time drawing the fruit or the flowers or what have you. Moody's piece is less a still-life and more a painting of an already existing still-life. There is a subcategory of still lifes of books and postcards and the like that is centuries old. is this plagiarism?  I am just saying that Moody's work is different from Lichtenstein's. It would be closer to Rosenquist. |
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Confessor
CCF Mod Squad
Not Bucky O'Hare!
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Post by Confessor on Jan 11, 2018 19:29:45 GMT -5
Doesn't matter how many excuses you make for him, Roy Lichtenstein was a thief and a con man hiding behind a b.s. rationalization. He could easily have made similar paintings in that style without directly copying the work of others. Screw him and every wealthy idiot who rewarded him for his larceny. I don't really agree with this, but putting that aside for a moment, do you not think Lichtenstein's comic-derived Pop Art might've helped elevate comic book art to a point where it was given serious consideration as an art form for the first time by the critical cognoscenti? What I mean by that is, back in the early '60s, the likes of Irv Norvak would've just been anonymous "cogs in the machine", producing work that was widely regarded as sub-standard, disposable junk by the critical establishment. As I said earlier, this anonymity on the part of comic creators in our modern, mass-produced world is, in part, precisely what Lichtenstein was commenting on. Hell, even a great magazine illustrator like Norman Rockwell wasn't really considered to be a "real artist" in the world of art criticism back then. But once Lichtenstein's comic-themed Pop Art was up on the gallery wall, that was a different kettle of fish. I don't think it's much of a stretch to say that art establishment types may've looked at comic book artwork with a little less disdain post-Lichtenstein than they did prior. Over a period of decades, with many other additional factors working to highlight the artistic worth of comics, we get to a point where the idea of comics having real artistic merit isn't automatically met with howls of derisive laughter. I'm not saying that this is solely down to Lichtenstein, or even that it was ever his intention, but I do think there's merit to the idea that his work opened the critical world's eyes to the "artfulness" of comics. |
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Jan 11, 2018 19:44:18 GMT -5
It's not dismissing still-lifes. It may be recognizing that nobody previously spent time drawing the fruit or the flowers or what have you. Moody's piece is less a still-life and more a painting of an already existing still-life. There is a subcategory of still lifes of books and postcards and the like that is centuries old. is this plagiarism? I am just saying that Moody's work is different from Lichtenstein's. It would be closer to Rosenquist. I can't tell what book it is, much less read multiple pages of it. So it's clearly very different. |
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