Roy Lichtenstein: Quotes about art

Roy Lichtenstein was American pop artist. Explore interesting quotes on art.
Roy Lichtenstein: 30 quotes0 likes

“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

Source: 1960's, What is Pop Art? Interviews with eight painters' (1963), pp. 25-27

“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

Source: 1960's, What is Pop Art? Interviews with eight painters' (1963), pp. 25-27

“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 w: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

Source: 1960's, What is Pop Art? Interviews with eight painters' (1963), pp. 25-27

“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

Source: 1960's, What is Pop Art? Interviews with eight painters' (1963), pp. 25-27

“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

Source: 1960's, What is Pop Art? Interviews with eight painters' (1963), pp. 25-27

“Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms.”

Roy Lichtenstein

Quoted in Jonathon Green, The Macmillan Dictionary of Contemporary Quotations (1996) p. 179
1990's

“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

Source: 1960's, What is Pop Art? Interviews with eight painters' (1963), pp. 25-27

“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 Lichtenstein in: Interview by G.R. Swenson (1963); as quoted in Painters on Painting, Eric Protter (1971) p. 263
1960's

“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

Source: 1960's, What is Pop Art? Interviews with eight painters' (1963), pp. 25-27

“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

Source: 1960's, What is Pop Art? Interviews with eight painters' (1963), pp. 25-27

“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

Source: 1960's, What is Pop Art? Interviews with eight painters' (1963), pp. 25-27