Volume 40, Number 21 · December 16, 1993
Big, Bright & Bendayed
By John Updike
Roy Lichtenstein 8, 1993–January 16, 1994
an exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York October
Roy Lichtenstein
catalog of the exhibition by Diane Waldman
Guggenheim Museum, 394 pp., $42.95 (paper)
In attending the Roy Lichtenstein show at the Guggenheim Museum, I made a mistake: imagining that the exhibit, like most I have viewed in that cunning spiral, would begin at the top, I took the elevator up, and found myself not at Lichtenstein's dawn as an artist but flung headlong into his latest, slickest phase. A quiet sign beckoned me yet upward, through one of the Guggenheim's cavelike little archways, and I was in a large room holding large canvases from the 1990s—meticulous crystallizations, or visual embalmings, of prototypical American living quarters. It was without doubt the best-illumined viewing space of my museum-going experience; had I stayed in it longer, I might have acquired a tan. However, the paintings, with their wrought iron outlines and industrial-quality Bendaydots and prefab stripes, and their squared-off sofas and end tables, and their stark little simplifications of name-brand artworks, including some of Lichtenstein's, did not invite lingering contemplation, and I plunged impatiently on the smooth slope downward, in search of the comic strip enlargements that are Lichtenstein's deathless contribution to contemporary art.
Review, 2233 words
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