Pop artists were born to be on our breasts, printed on T-shirts. They broke down the wall that separated advertising from art and the product of the masterpiece. In short, the high of the low culture. Art for all audiences, but not for all budgets: they were more popular in their references than in their prices. Roy Lichtenstein created direct and immediate images, from the most insignificant matters. Everyday rhetoric capable of producing beauty in a world (that of the product) incapable of producing it. Hence his admiration for the extreme simplicity of Piet Mondrian's proposal. In 1964 the North American artist made a copy of the Dutchman's compositions - in the work Non-Objective I -, but he included his personal signature: he filled in some of the rectangles with Ben-Day template dots. He parodied the one he admired. From then on, the artist's palette was limited to the primary colors used by Mondrian, also in his famous versions of the vignettes on canvas. Faced with the dilemmas and existential melodrama of abstract expressionism, Lichtenstein answered the transcendent pomp of artists like Rothko, who curiously also adored Mondrian, of whom he said he was "the most sensual artist".
Whaam! it was first exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in 1963 (and was purchased by the Tate Gallery in 1966). Lichtenstein reproduces - or recomposes, as he preferred to call it - one of the cartoons from the comic All American Men Of War (1962). The monumental canvas posed a basic idea of pop: ideas are abolished. There is no message, it is not intended to encourage reflection. It is pure and simple celebration. A party in which everything is worth and everyone enters, a truce of conscience. A part of the criticism wanted to see in Lichtenstein's painting his perception of American civilization by amplifying a war comic image. Pure anesthesia, a shot of archetypes ideal for the walls of any room: it is art without signature or discomfort. "Hyperconsumism frees us from any other imperative than consuming without rest," writes Serge Latouche, professor emeritus of Economic Sciences at the University Paris-Sud. Lichtenstein explained it this way: “We think that the previous generation tried to reach their subconscious, while pop artists tried to distance themselves from our work. I want my work to have a programmed and impersonal air, but I don't think I am impersonal while doing it ”.
Virtual visit: Whaam! (1963), by Roy Lichtenstein, preserved at Tate Modern (London).