To many people Lichtenstein was just a painter of large paintings based on popular comics, and has been called " the worst artist in the USA. However this the first major retrospective of his work sets out to show that he was really one of the finest painters of the 20th century.
It starts of by showing some of his early work in which he parodied the abstract impressionists, by carefully painting brush strokes.
We then moved onto his first experiments with dot paintings in 1962/3, when he painted everyday objects using the techniques which he borrowed from cheaply printed comic books and his first use of a Mickey Mouse comic book picture.
He developed his dot technique by painting every day functional objects, such as this car tyre. As well as being representations of these objects these paintings also have an abstract quality about them.
This took us into the first big room which was devoted to the paintings which he is best known by, depicting love and war, and taken from comic book pictures. These were extensively worked over to improve the composition and give more artistic impact.
The first example is called " The Kiss" and is very typical of the big blown up extract from a comic book picture.
This is possibly his most famous painting called "Wham" it covers two large canvases.
Between 1964 -1967 Lichtenstein painted some very simple landscapes using his dots to produce landscapes which in a way were just horizontal abstract compositions, but still capture the feeling of landscapes.
He also explored art deco shapes which he called " Cubism for the home". These abstract shapes were produced both as paintings but also as some very striking brass sculptures.
We then moved into another large room entitled Art about Art, which to me was the most exciting part of the exhibition, and introduced me to works which I was not at all familiar with. In this room were some of the paintings which could be called either parodies or tributes to artists , whom Lichtenstein admired, particularly Picasso, who he considered " the greatest artist of the 20th century".
Lichtenstein took well known works by such artists as Monet, Mondrian and Picasso and reworked them in his own style.
This work is based on Picasso's Woman of Algiers ( the top painting), and in some ways I think he outdoes Picasso, as he also did in this painting based on Mondrian's work.
The next room showed his tribute to Matisse's Pink and Red studio paintings. In one of these he added a direct reference to Matisse's The Dance.
Mirrors featured some very minimalist paintings of mirrors, which actually looked like mirrors, being sort of "trompe l'oeil reproductions of mirrors.
The Perfect/Imperfect series of paintings show Lichtenstein experimenting with pure abstraction. he drew a line following it along the canvas and then filled the spaces with areas of flat colour , dots or diagonal lines. In a way he was parodying abstract painting, as he said " It seemed to be the most meaningless way to make an abstraction".
In the mid-1990's Lichtenstein explored the field of painting the nude female figure. However unlike most artists who use live models, he again explored his library of comic images, and then undressed them, before making these nude paintings of them. Even though you would think that this method would produce bland paintings, they are in fact full of sensuality and intimacy.
Finally we come to his Chinese landscapes. he was fascinated by the simplicity of Chinese Art and and in 1995 he produced more than 20 landscapes. Using different sizes of dots he was able to get the atmospheric quality and subtle depth of the original Chinese paintings. I thought that these works were amongst the finest of his work, and really captured the atmosphere of Chinese painting as yoou can see in "Landscape with Fog".
I really enjoyed this exhibition. It made me realise that what I had thought at an earlier Lichtenstein exhibition, that he was a really good painter , was correct. I did not realise however that he was so inventive in the scope of his paintings, and that so much could be portrayed through what looks so simple a technique, but is in actual fact a very time consuming process, taking a great deal of planning and execution.
Do not miss this show. I am sure that you will be impressed.