This Groundbreaking Exhibit Of Roy Lichtenstein’s Early Paintings Shows The Melodrama That Made His Art Pop

When George Washington crossed the Delaware River to ambush enemy soldiers in the Battle of Trenton, nobody was on hand to portray his masterful tactical maneuver. The famous depiction hanging in the Metropolitan Museum of Art – replicated on the New Jersey state quarter – was created more than half a century after the American Revolution was won, the handiwork of a German-American artist named Emanuel Leutze who hoped to rally liberal political reform in Europe with his polemical art. However Leutze was not the only painter to take Washington’s crossing as a subject. The American Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein painted the Revolutionary ambush twice in 1951.

You might not recognize the canvases as Lichtenstein’s. The 28-year-old artist was still a decade away from his Pop breakthrough: depicting Disney cartoons with ersatz benday dots. You might also fail to identify Lichtenstein’s gestural abstractions from 1960 as part of his artistic oeuvre. In fact, the average Lichtenstein fan would be confounded by practically all of the canvases included in an extraordinary early Lichtenstein retrospective currently on view at the Colby College Museum of Art. For precisely that reason, every aficionado of Lichtenstein’s Pop paintings should see the show and read the superlative catalogue.

The George Washington of Lichtenstein’s Washington Crossing the Delaware I is no Mickey Mouse, but he’s also a far cry from Leutze’s heroic military figure. Painted with the faux naïveté of children’s art popular with the avant-garde of midcentury Europe, Lichtenstein’s Founding Father is stripped of grandeur. He’s basically just a guy in a funny-looking hat. By extension, the mythic bombast of America’s founding appears laughably infantile.

Mocking Washington crossing the Delaware – as well as Washington Crossing the Delaware – with his shrewd parody of European avant-garde posturing, Lichtenstein seems to have established a visual strategy that later made his Pop art so effective. Appropriating a pseudo-mechanical commercial style that simultaneously satirized popular culture and art history – especially in his recapitulations of masterpieces by Monet and Matisse – Lichtenstein would ultimately compel viewers to evaluate both without preconceptions. As a mature artist, Lichtenstein became a master of leveraging one set of assumptions against another to expose the blind spots underlying both of them.

Another important Pop art tactic appears to have emerged from Lichtenstein’s pre-Pop engagement with abstraction. Beginning in the late 1950s, seeking to look more contemporary, Lichtenstein used bedsheets to apply thick stripes of paint to blank canvases. The gestural quality gave this work the look of Abstract Expressionism, but what stood out most for him was the materiality. “I was… making an object almost,” he later told the curator Diane Waldman. “It was making a brushstroke, building a brushstroke.”

Lichtenstein’s quasi-sculptural construction of an element of depiction amounted to a meta-depiction of it, anticipating the way he would paint the dots that were used by printers to replicate the color fields hand-drawn by comic book artists. Although this transformation of form into content was most explicit in his deadpan portrayal of Abstract Expressionist brushstrokes in the mid-1960s, Lichtenstein engaged in these inversions throughout his career. They allowed him to see – and to show – what formal choices communicate in their own right, making his work foundational to visual literacy in the age of mass-media.

There is always a risk of getting swept up in hindsight, a danger of freighting Lichtenstein’s early experiments with the intentionality of Pop, much as Emanuel Leutze anachronistically projected 19^th century perceptions of the first President onto an 18^th century military gambit that could have drowned General Washington. Looking backward for harbingers of what followed is problematic as a method of historical analysis, but has merit as a mode of insight. Even if Lichtenstein himself was mistaken in his explanation of his late-50s abstractions – misremembering or misrepresenting what he’d done when he spoke with Waldman in 1971 – his claim can still provide a new way of seeing his Brushstrokes or appreciating his handmade benday dots.

The art on view at Colby College has the potential to do for Lichtenstein what Lichtenstein did for so many previous artists. Looking at his past, we see the canonical work afresh.