Brushstrokes
Brushstrokes (examples)
(external web links)
A series of paintings and sculptures by the American pop art artist Roy Lichtenstein from the years 1965 to 1968 is called Brushstrokes . The series consists of large-format, monochrome brushstrokes with black borders and grooves on dotted backgrounds.
description
The brushstroke representations are each pictures on which individual or partially overlapping brushstrokes as well as partially also represented paint splatters are painted in the comic style typical of Lichtenstein . He chose clear, luminous colors such as yellow, green, red, blue or even white, with which he filled in the painted brushstrokes in monochrome.
The seemingly spontaneous brushstrokes created in this way are framed by black contour lines and the individual hairlines of the brush are also represented by black lines. The background is formed by uniform areas of blue or red benday dots , against which the brushstrokes stand out.
Emergence
Lichtenstein got his first ideas for creating pictures with isolated brushstrokes as the center of attention in the early 1960s through a comic picture of a crazy professor who, in the story, painted out the image of a villain chasing him with a cross of color. The idea was reinforced by his preoccupation with abstract expressionism when he painted his versions of pictures by Pablo Picasso and Piet Mondrian .
He was able to realize the brushstrokes by applying the models to a film made of cellulose acetate with a brush , which he then projected onto the canvas and was able to trace and color.
interpretation
The brushstrokes were intended to portray an apparent spontaneity in the images and at the same time caricature them. Due to the painted brushstrokes, these have frozen in their spontaneity and thus only become images of them. Lichtenstein is alluding to the overemphasized role of the individual brushstroke, which was in the foreground in works by expressionists such as Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning .
He isolated the brushstroke, enlarged and coarsened it at the same time and reproduced the result in the form of a comic . Thereby he represents the symbol for the individuality of every single work of art used by the representatives of Expressionism as an element in the symbol of commercial mass production. He thus blurs the difference between individual artistic style and commercial mass product and poses the question of the difference between a recurring identification mark of an artist and a standard symbol of industrial production.
supporting documents
literature
- Janis Hendrickson: Roy Lichtenstein. The irony of the banal. Benedikt Taschen Verlag, Cologne 1988, 1994, ISBN 3-8228-9135-5
- Yellow and Green Brushstrokes. In: Klaus Honnef: Pop Art. Taschen GmbH, Cologne 2006, pp. 54–55, ISBN 978-3-8228-2216-6
Note: The externally linked images are protected by copyright and are not subject to the GNU FDL .