Roy Lichtenstein and Frederic Tuten

By ADRIAN TAHOURDIN

Anyone who visited the recent wonderful Roy Lichtenstein retrospective
at Tate Modern and made use of the audioguide will have heard a tribute to the
artist from his friend Frederic Tuten: “I knew him for more than thirty years.
I think he was the happiest person I’ve ever known in my life, ever. Ever . . .
. It was really remarkable to know him”. Elsewhere he wrote “To understate,
that is the quiet beauty of the work”.

Tuten, a novelist and writer on art, has had considerable succès
d’estime with his five novels (he was born in 1936 in New York). Lichtenstein
put the seal on the friendship by providing cover illustrations for two of
Tuten’s published works, both “created expressly for this novel”: The Adventures of Mao on the Long March
(1971) and Tintin in the New World
(1993). 

 

Any self-respecting Tintinophile will be familiar with Tintin in the New World, a playful and
imaginative expansion of the boy reporter’s life experience: he loses his
virginity and receives instruction from the main characters in Thomas Mann’s cerebral
door-stopper The Magic Mountain. He
grows a beard and gets a sun tan! The novel is dedicated to “the memory of
my friend Georges Remi (Hergé)”. Susan Sontag, whose approbations can be found
on the covers of more than one of Tuten's novels, wrote
of it “I love the way the novel deepens as it goes, the music, the sadness, and
the inventive humor. Its wisdom and its art moved me very much”. Of the Mao
novel she said “. . . Tuten has written a violently hilarious book”, while another
novel, Tallien: A brief romance
(1988), prompted the comment “There’s nothing like the ride and rush that
Frederic Tuten can give. His ‘brief romance’ is the real thing: unforgettable” -
not a bad trio of recommendations from such an eminent critic. (Mao also drew what must surely have been
a rare puff from Iris Murdoch: “Delightful and original - funny and bitter and
serious”.)

I read The Adventures of Mao recently and don’t feel it’s ageing well; its
experimentalism is a little willed. Tuten is not uncynical: at one point he has
a footnote that reads “See last month’s column, “Money to be made in
meditation”. Later, without warning, he indulges in a parody of Bernard
Malamud. I only know because Tuten tells the reader in his “Sources” at the
back of the book. There are also too-easy parodies of Kerouac and Hemingway, that are
wholly unrelated to the narrative. Lichtenstein’s portrait of Mao is nicely
ambivalent in its expression. I wonder what he made of the book.

 

Tallien, an imaginative reconstruction
of the life of the French revolutionary Jean-Lambert Tallien (1767–1820), who falls in love with and rescues a
beautiful aristocrat from the guillotine, is the most satisfying of Tuten’s
novels; it has its quirky moments too: a courtroom is described as smelling “like
the disinfected Métro stations of East Berlin”.

The Lichtenstein exhibition was reviewed in the TLS by James Hall, who didn’t appear very taken with it. I loved its wit
and sense of fun, the way it lifted the spirits, as well as the sexiness of the Late Nudes (“soft-porn cinematic cliché”,
according to Hall). In his excellent booklet Roy Lichtenstein: How modern art was saved by Donald Duck, Alastair
Sooke points out that “everything was fair game as a potential source for art.
In fact, the more clichéd something was, the better. You could even say that
Lichtenstein was the most clichéd artist who ever lived. But it was the way
that he presented clichés that made him great”. Sooke also fronted a BBC
documentary about the artist before the show in which he interviewed
Lichtenstein’s still-beautiful widow Dorothy.

One thing particularly struck me
about the show: the number of works borrowed from private collections (who
wouldn’t want a Lichtenstein hanging on their wall?), but having said that, one of my
favourites, the still life “Purist Painting with Bottles” (1975), was on loan
from the Wolverhampton Art Gallery.That I would dearly love to have on my wall.