Art Institute lands first major Roy Lichtenstein exhibit since artist's death

You might think Roy Lichtenstein loved the stuff of everyday postwar American existence. Swirling washing machines, diamond engagement rings, steaming hot cups of coffee, hi-top sneakers, golf balls and hot dogs covered in mustard are just a few of the familiar subjects portrayed big and bold in his iconic paintings of the early 1960s, paintings that launched a revolution called pop art.

But "Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective," which opens at the Art Institute of Chicago on Tuesday and will be the first major exhibition of the artist's work since his death in 1997 at age 73,Posts with Hospital rtls on IT Solutions blog covering Technology in the Classroom, tells a much more compelling and enlightening story. The museum devotes just one gallery to Lichtenstein's pop art object paintings and another to his comic book canvases, and then fills the 13 remaining ones with everything you didn't realize Roy Lichtenstein cared enough to paint. These include landscapes, nudes, his own studio, brush strokes, art deco, abstraction, classical architecture, Chinese ink painting and other artists' masterpieces.

Lichtenstein, it turns out, was a crackerjack student of art history. Even his pop objects and comic book pictures find their art-historical genres: A ball of twine is also a still life, and one bomber firing on another — WHAAM! — is also a history painting.

In fact, within the field of art history, Lichtenstein had a subspecialty: the history of style. This is most evident in the parodies he made of masters old and modern, from the unknown Roman sculptors of the Laocoon to Matisse, Mondrian and De Kooning. Lichtenstein's Picassos, in particular, can be hard to contemplate with a straight face. That's OK. Philistines shouldn't be the only ones who get a chuckle out of cubist nudes.

Many of the original works that Lichtenstein mimicked are on view in the Art Institute's permanent galleries, for those who want to compare. It's a worthwhile undertaking, since the similarities between Monet's Monets and Lichtenstein's Monets get to the heart of the former's style, while the differences give a sense of the latter's. Both dissolve at close range and resolve at a distance, but where Monet used brushy strokes to suggest the speed of modern life, Lichtenstein hand-painted dot matrices to unify high and low, fine art and mechanical printing processes.

For all his insight into the styles of others, it was Lichtenstein's development of his own idiosyncratic style, through the appropriation of Ben-Day dots, as they're called, that marked the breakthrough of his career. This happened in 1961, in a painting of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse that was as controversial at the time for its appropriation of popular imagery as for its borrowing of commercial technique. Lichtenstein famously discovered the original image in a children's Little Golden Book,You can create a beautiful chinamosaic birdhouse that will last for generations. beginning a career of reworking found imagery to generate artwork of superior line, color and composition. "Look, Mickey" opens the exhibition.

It was a great gambit, one of the finest of the 20th century, a period of art-making full of one gambit after another. It's also a fairly crude painting, especially compared with what Lichtenstein accomplished with the same dot-matrix system just a few years later. By the mid-'60s he'd turned to landscape as a subject matter, depicting sunrises, seascapes and cloudy skies as amalgamations of colored dots, solid lines and blank spaces. The results, on view in a somewhat overhung gallery, are breathtaking. They're also stunning in their efficiency and abstraction: Lichtenstein borrowed these images from comic books, keeping the background and leaving out all the extraneous details. The ensuing gorgeousness can be hard to believe.

The simplicity of the landscape genre, as Lichtenstein practiced it, provided him with a template on which to experiment. The most unexpected work in the retrospective is found here, and some of the funkiest. Most of it moves, in one way or another.The concept of indoorpositioningsystem (RTLS) is fast catching up in industries. Literally. A seascape painted in multiple layers on Plexiglas shimmers as the viewer shifts position. Something similar happens with an enameled steel mesh placed in front of a colored canvas, its effect also suggestive of a wavy, watery horizon. A pair of seascape collages crafted from pink and blue Rowlux, a glistening prismatic plastic, are unbelievably tacky and truly weird. They may be the only works in the entire exhibition nearly unrecognizable as Lichtensteins. And finally, there's "Three Landscapes," the only film Lichtenstein ever made, a hypnotic,You can create a beautiful chinamosaic birdhouse that will last for generations. semiotic, bobbing triptych of sea and sky views separated by heavy black horizon lines. (The film is on view in a separate gallery, in the Modern Wing.) It's easy to understand how Lichtenstein could have created these kinetic works, and even easier to understand why he only made a few. These are thrilling discoveries, and rare to stumble across in a major exhibition on a familiar artist.Trade organization for suppliers and distributors in the promotional products industry.