Lichtenstein/China: Powerful Surprise

Roy Lichtenstein is an artist who's easy to like, but hard to love. I've always considered his bright, Pop confections, crafted with his signature Ben-Day-dots, cheery but shallow--worth a look but not a linger.

But my standard assessment was shattered by a show (through April 7) at Gagosian's 24th Street emporium of Lichtenstein's "Landscapes in the Chinese Style." I was utterly unfamiliar with these late-career paintings (and a few related sculptures)--and totally taken with them. I actually said "wow" out loud when I entered the main space.

Exhibition View: "Roy Lichtenstein: Landscapes in the Chinese Style"

It's a perfect combination for me: ink-on-silk-scroll Chinese landscapes are one of my favorite genres (and really the only work from before the 1860s that I get into) and to see them rendered with such an appropriate contemporary spin, was an enchantment.

Roy Lichtenstein, "Landscape with Scholar's Rock" (1997)

Lichtenstein's dots, in various degrees of opacity, are ideally suited to mirror the obscuring mist so central to the romantic melancholy that I shamelessly admire in the original inspirations. The patches of in-your-face color, judiciously used, give the paintings a punchy vibrancy that the ink scrolls, with their faded pigments and inevitable display in darkened galleries behind glass, never can achieve (although the earthy, faded tones are also a part of their appeal). The sheer size of Lichtenstein's paintings also work to their advantage and emphasize their art-of-our-lifetime provenance (the work above is 13 feet long).  

Once again, I find myself feeling in debt to Larry Gagosian. Though by many accounts a deeply unpleasant person, the man is owed a medal of some sorts for the string of hugely entertaining and enlightening string of exhibition wonders he has put on over the last couple years--everything from works from Bob Rauschenberg's private collection to Picasso and his muse Marie-Therese to a Manzoni retrospective.

(As a concluding footnote, while it's common to spot such semi-celebrity gallerists as David Zwirner or Andrea Rosen prowling their spaces, I had never laid eyes on the Great Man himself, despite many dozens of visits to all three of his Manhattan outposts.

Larry Gagosian

I finally saw him a couple Friday early-evenings ago, on the closing weekend of the Damien Hirst dot-painting travesty, leaving through the lobby his Madison Ave. flagship. He was alone, without the entourage I would have expected. I bowed slightly, as only fitting God; and was totally ignored, again only fitting. Still, his solo status made him a little endearing as he headed off for the weekend. A loner, like me?)