Hall of Mirrors: Roy Lichtenstein and the Face of Painting in the 1960s

In Hall of Mirrors, Graham Bader traces the development of RoyLichtenstein's art into, through, and beyond his classic pop oeuvre of the 1960s.Bader charts the trajectory of Lichtenstein's practice from his student days in thelate 1940s to his mirror paintings of the 1970s, offering new readings of suchcanonical paintings as Look Mickey and Girl with Ball as well as examin

In Hall of Mirrors, Graham Bader traces the development of RoyLichtenstein's art into, through, and beyond his classic pop oeuvre of the 1960s.Bader charts the trajectory of Lichtenstein's practice from his student days in thelate 1940s to his mirror paintings of the 1970s, offering new readings of suchcanonical paintings as Look Mickey and Girl with Ball as well as examinations oflesser-known works across a range of media. Bader's analysis goes beyond thestandard critical view of pop as a reaction to the high-culture pieties of abstractexpressionism. Instead, Bader sees Lichtenstein's work as motivated by the forces of"unoriginal originality"--Lichtenstein's discovery that he could make artby "borrowing" from other images--and "disembodied bodies"--hisuse of flattened and schematic forms to reinvigorate figurative painting. Baderargues that 1961's Look Mickey, Lichtenstein's inaugural pop work, established atemplate for the tension between embodiment and disembodiment that animates much ofhis 1960s practice: between an evacuation of sensory experience, on the one hand, and a repeated focus on emphatic bodily acts (squeezing, kissing, crying, etc.) onthe other. A similar dialectical friction exists between Lichtenstein's process andproduct: consistently hand-painted canvases that increasingly feign the look ofindustrial production. Hall of Mirrors moves chronologically, beginning withLichtenstein's studies at Ohio State University and late-'50s moves toward pop, through his seminal canvases of the early 1960s, to his late-'60s experiments acrosssculpture, painting, installation, and film. The book ends with an examination ofLichtenstein's Mirror paintings of 1969--72. These little-discussed works, Baderargues, exemplify Lichtenstein's late-'60s shift of focus to the embodied experienceof his own viewers--and thus culminate and conclude his practice of thedecade.