Detail

As matter of factly as Roy Lichtenstein employs comic strips and commercials for his paintings so he appropriates the most popular paintings and styles in the history of art. To him, they are a readily available part of the banal mass culture which does not make a distinction between high and popular mass culture any more. In "Modular Painting with Four Panels" Lichtenstein refers to the glorification of rationality in architecture and design in the Thirties, he once called “somehow blindly geometrical.” “The Thirties preference for logic had a somewhat absurd touch. In my work, I like to relate the Thirties to rational art of today. What is done today has a certain irony, however. One knows it is not common any more to be rational. Art déco, the mass style of the Thirties, experienced a revival at the end of the Sixties in the U.S. and shaped Lichtenstein’s immediate environment in New York. "Modular Painting with Four Panels" illustrates how Lichtenstein transfers style elements of Art deco to his screen system of points derived from printing. He is interested in tracing formal similarities but also differences. The graphical simplification and standardization of forms correspond a large square consisting of four smaller square paintings each repeating the same interplay of curves, arches, and diagonals.