It was these paintings of women that sparked Karp’s interest, specifically Girl with Ball, and prompted him to encourage Leo Castelli to represent Lichtenstein at his gallery. Indeed, two of the four paintings shown to Ivan Karp in the above-mentioned meeting were of women: The Engagement Ring and Girl with Ball.
5 Others, however, were modeled off the ever-present advertisements in magazines and other printed publications like the Yellow Book, a telephone directory that was consistently replete with small, illustrated ads for local businesses. Many take the form of high-drama depictions of women in the throes of emotional angst-typically at the hands of men-from melodramatic scenes in comic books. Though women would figure periodically throughout Lichtenstein’s career, their appearance as focused subject matter was notably prominent in this beginning phase, from 1961 to 1965. 4 Consequently, Lichtenstein created the seminal Benday dot, comic-inspired paintings for which he is most known today.Īmong these early forays into comic book imagery were numerous depictions of women. They praised his use of conventional “low culture” for high art, and urged Lichtenstein to further push that notion. This encouragement grew stronger when Lichtenstein’s new colleagues discovered his painterly drawings of the iconic American cartoon characters Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. Lichtenstein’s new colleagues encouraged him to abandon the dominant styles to which he had adhered for the previous several years, and to remember that “art doesn’t have to look like art,” as Kaprow often stated. Kaprow’s cohorts at Rutgers, including Robert Watts, George Brecht, Lucas Samaras, George Segal, Robert Whitman, and Geoffrey Hicks, likewise assumed this radical stance of embracing contemporary life in art, and it was into this atmosphere that Lichtenstein arrived with his Abstract Expressionist and post-painterly canvases when he joined the faculty in 1960. 2 Subsequently, Kaprow penned the essay “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock” two years after the venerated Abstract Expressionist’s death, in which he offered a novel perspective on Pollock’s contribution to the development of avant-garde art: “Pollock, as I see him, left us at the point where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday life, either our bodies, clothes, rooms, or, if need be, the vastness of Forty-second Street.” He went on to clarify: “Objects of every sort are materials for the new art: paint, chairs, food, electric and neon lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies, a thousand other things that will be discovered by the present generation of artists.” 3 Cage inspired Kaprow-along with numerous other artists of the time-to embrace aspects of everyday life in art, rather than use art as a means to escape life. Kaprow had been teaching at Rutgers since the early 1950s, and had spearheaded what would become a thriving avant-garde art scene, largely motivated by the ideas he learned from musician John Cage, whose classes he attended at the New School in nearby New York. Kaprow and Lichtenstein met while teaching at Douglass College, part of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Lichtenstein had developed an entirely new aesthetic language that transformed the visual culture of everyday life into a subject matter for high art-the beginnings of what would become known as Pop art. Kaprow recognized the radical nature of these canvases, particularly in the continuing wake of Abstract Expressionism. 1 Namely, Lichtenstein utilized the Benday dot method, or dots of color from the four-color process printing system (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black) to create secondary colors and shading. The paintings, The Engagement Ring (1961), Girl with Ball (1961), Look Mickey (1961), and Step-on Can with Leg (1961), featured cartoon-like depictions of mass media imagery, some taken from comic books while others from advertisements, and combined elements painted by hand with concepts borrowed from mechanical reproduction. The purpose of the meeting was to show Karp four of the new “comic book paintings” that Lichtenstein had recently made.
In the autumn of 1961, performance artist Allan Kaprow arranged a meeting between Roy Lichtenstein and Ivan Karp, director of the influential Leo Castelli Gallery in New York.
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