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Roy Lichtenstein -
Art
Quotes
10 Sourced Quotes
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I paint directly – then it's said to be an exact copy; and not
art
, probably because there's no perspective or shading. It doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself. Instead of looking like a painting of a billboard – the way a Reginald Marsh would look – Pop
Art
seems to be the actual thing. It is intensification, a stylistic intensification of the excitement which the subject matter has for me; but the style is, as you said, cool.
Roy Lichtenstein
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'How can you [accept] exploitation?' 'How can you like the complete mechanization of work?' 'How can you like bad
art
?' I have to answer that I accept it as being there, in the world.
Roy Lichtenstein
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I suppose I would still prefer to sit under a tree with a picnic basket rather than under a gas pump, but signs and comics are interesting as subject matter. There are certain things that are usable, forceful, and vital about commercial
art
. We're using those things – but we're not really advocating stupidity, international teenagerism and terrorism.
Roy Lichtenstein
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Pop
Art
is the use of commercial
art
as a subject matter in painting, I suppose. It was hard to get a painting that was despicable enough so that no one would hang it – everybody was hanging everything. It was almost acceptable to hang a dripping paint rag, everybody [in America, mainly in New York, 1950s] was accustomed to this. The one thing everyone hated was commercial
art
; and apparently they didn't hate that enough either.
Roy Lichtenstein
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Well, it [Pop
Art
] is an involvement with what I think to be the most brazen and threatening characteristics of our culture, things we hate, but which are also powerful in their impingement on us. I think
art
since Paul Cezanne has become extremely romantic and unrealistic, feeding on
art
; it is utopian. It has had less and less to do with the world, it looks inward – neo Zen and all that. This is not so much a criticism as an obvious observation. Outside is the world; it's there. Pop
Art
looks out into the world; it appears to accept its environment, which is not good or bad, but different – another state of mind.
Roy Lichtenstein
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Artists have never worked with the model – just with the painting. What you [G. R. Swenson, the interviewer] are really saying is that an artist like Cézanne transforms what we think the painting ought to look like into something he thinks it ought to look like. He's working with paint, not nature; he's making a painting, he's forming. I think my work is different from comic strips – but I wouldn't call it transformation; I don't think that whatever is meant by it is important to
art
. What I do is form, whereas the comic strip is not formed in the sense I'm using the word; the comics have shapes but there has been no effort to make them intensely unified. The purpose is different, one intends to depict and I intend to unify.
Roy Lichtenstein
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Organized perception is what is
art
all about... It is a process. It has nothing to do with any external form the painting takes, it has to do with a way of building a unified pattern of seeing...
Roy Lichtenstein
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Everybody has called Pop
Art
'American' painting, but it's actually industrial painting. America was hit by industrialism and capitalism harder and sooner and its values see more askew... I think the meaning of my work is that it's industrial; it's what all the world will soon become. Europe will be the same way, soon, so it [Pop
Art
] won't be American; it will be universal.
Roy Lichtenstein
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In Abstract Expressionism the paintings symbolize the idea of ground-directedness as opposed to object-directedness. You put something down, react to it, put something else down, and the painting itself becomes a symbol of this. The difference is that rather than symbolize this ground-directedness I do an object-directed appearing thing. There is humor here. The work is still ground-directed; the fact that it's an eyebrow or an almost direct copy of something is unimportant. The ground-directedness is in the painter's mind and not immediately in apparent in the painting. Pop
Art
makes the statement that ground-directedness is not a quality that the painting has because of what it looks like...
Roy Lichtenstein
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What interests me is to paint the kind of anti-sensitivity that impregnates modern civilization. I think
art
since Cezanne has become extremely romantic and unrealistic, feeding on
art
. It is Utopian. It has less and less to do with the world. It looks inward — neo-Zen and all that. Pop
Art
looks out into the world. It doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.
Roy Lichtenstein
Quote of the day
It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.
Philip K. Dick
Roy Lichtenstein
Creative Commons
Born:
October 27, 1923
Died:
September 29, 1997
(aged 73)
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