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Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:05] We’re in SFMOMA, and we’re looking at a hilarious triptych. It’s called “Rouen Cathedral Set V,” and it was painted in 1969 by Roy Lichtenstein, the Pop artist.

[0:18] This is just, say, seven or eight years after Pop has really established itself in the United States, but Pop has also really run its course. There’s a sort of difference that’s taking place here. There’s a real thoughtfulness about the implications.

Dr. Beth Harris: [0:31] Of what they’ve done. If you think about earlier work by Lichtenstein or Warhol, Lichtenstein blowing up comic book frames like the “Drowning Girl” at MOMA or Warhol’s “Soup Cans.”

[0:44] Those are sort of more classically Pop and drawing from pop culture, but here Lichtenstein is obviously, as you said, being more thoughtful about his place in art history and redoing Monet’s series of Rouen Cathedral. So he’s doing a series based on a series. It looks like just magnification of a reproduction because we’ve got those Ben-Day dots.

Dr. Zucker: [1:09] Which are meant to replicate, of course, bad printing in say, a comic book from the early ’60s.

Dr. Harris: [1:14] Let’s talk about those dots, those circles. Those are coming from a kind of color reproduction that we still use today that are called Ben-Day dots. Usually, they’re so small we can’t see them, but Lichtenstein has enlarged them and, interestingly, this sort of takes on the look of that bad reproduction that you just referred to, but actually these are painted.

[1:38] He’s still painting them, but the individuality of that mark-making that happens when Monet paints those short, beautiful brush strokes is not here anymore. When we’re up close like this I can’t really see anything but colored dots.

Dr. Zucker: [1:52] Those Ben-Day dots.

Dr. Harris: [1:53] You really have to move back so that the paintings by Monet that this triptych is based on can come into focus a little bit.

Dr. Zucker: [2:00] You’d say the same thing about a Monet painting, wouldn’t you?

Dr. Harris: [2:02] That’s true, that it dissolves into brushstrokes when you’re up close.

Dr. Zucker: [2:05] I think it’s so funny though that it has, in a sense, the same visual quality as a Monet in its illegibility, but this is a mechanized structure which is an expression of the 20th century as opposed to Monet’s individual brushwork.

Dr. Harris: [2:18] You have Monet’s interest in his own subjective vision and his own subjective application of paint on the canvas, and he painted Rouen Cathedral at different times of the day, and so each moment is unique, each painting is unique, and yet they’re part of a series.

Dr. Zucker: [2:36] The irony is that Lichtenstein painted these by hand. That’s not to say he didn’t use a stencil, but they’re still hand-painted. And so there is this funny play in both sets that really is just brought to the fore about this conflict between mechanization…

Dr. Harris: [2:49] And hand painting and the subjective vision and uniqueness.

Dr. Zucker: [2:54] They’re just hilarious and wonderful, aren’t they?

Dr. Harris: [2:55] They’re very fun.

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