Roy Lichtenstein, Look Mickey

0:00:06.5 Dr. Steven Zucker: We’re in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., looking at a very famous canvas. This is Roy Lichtenstein’s Look Mickey from 1961. Go back 65 years, when this painting was first made, and the kind of boundary-breaking that the artist is engaged in here was not only radical, it was an affront to everything that art had meant. He’s bringing humor, he’s bringing the tawdry, and challenging us. Is this serious? Can this be fine art?

0:00:35.6 Dr. Beth Harris: It’s just this very funny moment, and you look at the speech bubble coming from Donald Duck. These are all characters we recognize. Mickey has his hand over his mouth because he’s just dying to laugh because he’s noticed that Donald Duck has actually hooked his own jacket instead of a fish, and the whole thing is just ridiculous. And yet here we are within this very serious space of an art museum.

0:01:02.3 Dr. Steven Zucker: I think one of the key issues here is that popular culture, the stuff from newspapers, from advertising, the images that we confront every day, was not considered fine art. It was not considered a world that fine art could even consider. And what the artist has done here is he’s put it front and center. The artist has transformed this image from the original. Ironically, the original is more naturalistic. This is more simplified. The colors are bolder. The colors are reduced. We have white, we have blue, we have red, we have yellow. These are the primary colors, and all of that screams a kind of popular culture, but here blown up large on a canvas, signaling that it’s meant to be taken seriously, that there is some serious message here.

0:01:48.0 Dr. Beth Harris: There are those serious marks of an artist. I can see brush strokes. I can see where the paint thins out in some areas. Even the lettering looks like it was painted, and I’m noticing where the words “look” and “big” are emphasized. There’s even pencil outlines for some of the forms. So there’s this idea that he sketched this, that it was based on a drawing, that this is carefully planned.

0:02:14.2 Dr. Steven Zucker: So on the one hand, it is ridiculous. On the other, I think the artist is asking some very serious questions about what constitutes art and where do we locate its value. And I think that it’s clear that we’re not going to find value in the artist’s brushwork, in the artist’s technique. So where is the subject? Where are we supposed to find meaning? I think that the artist is asking us to think about the way that contemporary culture, popular culture, the visual stuff of our everyday lives had not been allowed into fine art.

0:02:45.8 Dr. Beth Harris: And yet we could think about moments when artists have drawn upon the everyday world. We can think about Picasso using newspaper print. Go back a little bit more to the art of Manet and the Impressionists, and they’re embracing the boulevards of Paris, the cafes, modern life. It’s not mythology or history. It’s the stuff of everyday life in their paintings.

0:03:12.3 Dr. Steven Zucker: And the modern city was not considered beautiful in that moment, just like Mickey is not considered fine art and a thing of beauty in an aesthetic sense, in the way that we generally define beauty.

0:03:23.3 Dr. Beth Harris: Here we are in 1961. If we step back and think about the post-war period, we are actually looking at art that was removed from everyday life. So what’s happened here?

0:03:35.0 Dr. Steven Zucker: So in the immediate post-war period, what we would consider the most advanced art, Abstract Expressionism, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, were grappling with profound issues of whether or not humanity could survive its own destructive impulses. The Second World War had just ended. We understood the full gravity of the Holocaust. We had unleashed nuclear weaponry. The world was seen as a very dangerous place, and artists sought a kind of profundity in their work, in their abstraction, that was meant to meet that moment. But by the time we get to 1961, Abstract Expressionism is the dominant style of art, and it was stale. Some artists, like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, had begun to use irony in the mid-1950s, in some ways as a direct attack against Abstract Expressionism and its dominance and its sense of the profound, bringing in popular culture. But Lichtenstein is going even further. He’s making irony central to his art. He’s challenging us. Is this serious? Can this be fine art?

0:04:41.0 Dr. Beth Harris: It is true of Abstract Expressionism that there is a kind of idea of the artist taking their vision, their individuality, and putting that on the canvas. And so the art is very self-referential, and we have something very different here.

0:04:57.5 Dr. Steven Zucker: Look Mickey, is not referencing some deep interior psychoanalytic notions of the self, of what drives humanity on the individual level. This is slapstick humor. This is silly. If you look closely at the eyes of Donald Duck or at the face of Mickey, you’ll see that these are not solidly painted. What the artist did was actually take a dog brush with little balls at the end and dip that in paint and then place that against the surface to begin to mimic what are known as Ben Day dots, that is, the sort of coarse printing that one would find in a comic book that you’re not supposed to notice but create through a halftone, a sense of volume or color. And so the artist is creating a set of visual cues that is meant to replicate the mechanical processes that have taken over commercial art.

0:05:46.1 Dr. Beth Harris: So is Lichtenstein saying, this is who we are in 1961? We are superficial? We exist in a consumer culture of advertising and mass media and TV. And this is a truer reflection of Americans in 1961.

0:06:04.0 Dr. Steven Zucker: Yes, but that was also a slap in the face. The work was really provocative in 1961 because it’s asking us to relocate our definition of art, to expand our definition of art, to widen the possible array of subject matter to include the stuff that we come into contact with every day that we had always dismissed as not worthy of art, but that is actually the day-to-day stuff of our visual culture.

0:06:29.1 Dr. Beth Harris: So one could say this is a continuation of a project started by Marcel Duchamp in the early decades of the 20th century, where something like a snow shovel mounted in a museum can be art challenging those categories of what is art and what is not and why a certain context allows us to see something as art. And it makes me think about the incredible persistence of that idea of high art and how important it is that even after Duchamp in the early decades of the 20th century, 50 years later, we’re still challenging it.

0:07:04.5 Dr. Steven Zucker: Duchamp was known only by a very small audience in the 19-teens and 20s, and it was only in the mid-1950s and in the early 1960s that he becomes a much more broadly known figure and is in a sense resurrected. And his ideas are absolutely central to the kind of irreverence that we’re seeing here, but also to the inclusion of non-fine art content within the realm of fine art. But it’s one thing for Duchamp to bring a snow shovel, a ready-made object into a gallery. Lichtenstein is doing something that is in some ways even more of an affront because he’s dealing here with the pictorial. Disney was creating images that were immediately recognizable, that dealt with linear perspective, that dealt with chiaroscuro, simplified, yes, so that the image was clear and concise. And Lichtenstein is taking that abbreviated imagery and pushing it even further, making it more simple, reducing the colors, making everything as schematic as possible, and then putting that up as fine art. In a sense, a confrontation with Manet, with Velázquez, with Rembrandt, with the great masters of representation. We can think about a work by Rembrandt, and it is glorious. It can be absolutely breathtakingly beautiful, and it can bring us a sense of the depths of the human experience.

0:08:26.1 Dr. Steven Zucker: But in order to see that Rembrandt, we have to go to the museum, and most people don’t. What most people do is they see a representation in a magazine or on a computer screen, and that is mediated through a different technology. And in Lichtenstein’s era, that would have been the Ben Day dot, the printing technology of the newspaper. That’s how people actually experience things mostly. That’s the truth of our visual experience. And what Lichtenstein is doing is making that truth the subject of his art.

This work at the National Gallery of Art

Browse the Roy Lichtenstein Catalogue Raisonné from the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation

Steven Henry Madoff, editor, Pop Art: A Critical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

Diane Waldman, Roy Lichtenstein, exhibition catalogue (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1993).

Pop art, an introduction

1945–80 in the United States, an introduction

Read a Reframing Art History textbook chapter, Popular, transient, expendable: print culture and propaganda in the 20th century