Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings stick in your mind. They are memorable and congenial. When I went to Roy Lichtenstein: Like New, the first major survey of his work in more than 30 years, at the Whitney Museum, I expected to be surprised by something new the curators dug up in their research into the sources of many of the more than 130 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints on view. I was not initially disappointed.
Throughout his life, Lichtenstein credited Hoyt Sherman, his teacher at Ohio State University, with teaching him how to see. Lichtenstein gave his first son the middle name “Hoyt” and, after becoming successful, endowed the Hoyt L. Sherman Studio Art Center at the university in the 1990s. Sherman developed an experimental program where students were shown objects briefly in a darkened room and asked to draw them, an experience that is the opposite of traditional life drawing classes. Near the beginning of the exhibition, there is a darkened room with a 15-minute video reenacting one of Sherman’s “Flash Labs.” Artist Alex Da Corte, also one of the curators of the show, acts as Sherman; he wears prosthetics, and playfully teaches the class. Hung on the wall, at different heights, are some of Lichtenstein’s works from the ‘60s.
Da Corte and his team also recreated four murals, including “Greene Street Mural” (1983), which is nearly 100 feet (~30.5 m) in length, and “Super Sunset Billboard” (1967) in the museum’s west-facing window, so museum visitors can time their visit and see two sunsets at once. I think these and other jokes muddied the waters of a famous artist widely celebrated for his charming, emotionally empty (or should I say repressed?) paintings drawn from comic strips, advertising, and paintings by other famous artists, including Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, and Chinese classical masters such as Mi Youren. Perhaps they didn’t want us to think too long about what happens when charm loses its allure.