Brushstroke
Brushstroke (1965) was the first painting of the Brushstroke series created by American Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein between 1965 and 1966, and then continued in 1980s and 1990s. Although Lichtenstein abandoned the comic book motifs for which he was originally celebrated, he still drew inspiration from the aesthetic and the style of popular imagery. Comic books remain the chief influence of the Brushstroke series. In fact, the initial source for Brushstroke (1965) was a panel from the comic strip The Painting from October 1964 edition of Strange Suspense Stories published by Charlton Comics. This comic book drawn by Dick Giordano, tells the story of a tortured artist and a painting that seems to take on a life of its own.
From the early 1960s, Lichtenstein began to explore art as a theme by reinterpreting masterpieces of his predecessors, like Woman with Flowered Hat (1963) based on Pablo Picasso’s Dora Maar with Cat (1941) and Non-Objective I (1964) inspired by the work of Piet Mondrian. Lichtenstein revisits this theme in a different way in the Brushstrokes series, this time focusing on the essence of painting, the painter’s brushstroke. The painting represents Lichtenstein’s commentary on the dominance of Abstract Expressionism, an art movement developed in America post World War II. Specifically, it refers to the works of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline, who painted in a spontaneous manner using large brushes to make broad gestural strokes. Brushstroke combines the rhythmical drips typical of Pollock and gestural sweeping brushstrokes of de Kooning. Lichtenstein also stated that he was greatly influenced by the Dutch Golden Age painter Frans Hals. Hals, who was also admired by Abstract Expressionists, was known for his painterly style and loose and unblended brushstrokes.
In the painting, Lichtenstein enlarged the brushstroke and eliminated some of the details from the original illustration. The artist mimicked the graphic style of the comic book in the use of diagonal slashes, black outlines, and primary colors. He also manually painted Ben-Day dots that were used in the production of inexpensive publications. In this way, Lichtenstein continued to combine ‘low’ art and ‘high’ art, mass-produced commercial imagery, and traditional easel painting. In the painting, he interpreted the spontaneous brushstroke in a popular mass-produced style. The artist explained: “It’s taking something that originally was supposed to mean immediacy and I’m tediously drawing something that looks like a brushstroke… I want it to look as though it were painstaking. It’s a picture of a picture and it’s a misconstrued picture of a picture.” The painting has a satirical quality, the brushstroke, the painter’s spontaneous and personal gesture is depersonalized – it becomes a generic, mass-produced sign.
The brushstroke remained an important motif throughout Lichtenstein’s career. From the 1980s, he reinterpreted the motif to new forms: models, medium-sized and monumental sculptures. Some famous examples of these include public sculptures like Brushstrokes in Flight (1984) at the John Glenn Columbus International Airport in Columbus, Ohio, Brushstroke (1996) at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, Spain, and Tokyo Brushwork I and II (1994) at the Parrish Museum in Water Mill, New York.
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