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The halftone dots used by Pop maestro Lichtenstein are world famous.
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Taking motifs from the realms of comics & consumerism, Lichtenstein made paintings by piecing together dots & colored surfaces.
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But a very different side of his work can be discovered at this exhibition in Museum Ludwig.
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Around 100 works, chiefly large-scale paintings along with a number of sculptures & drawings, reveal his fascinating explorations of style through the history of art – from Expressionism & Futurism to Bauhaus & Art Deco.
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Lichtenstein even appropriated works by his artist heroes - Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian, & even Dali - and interpreted them in an often ironic & cryptic manner using his own visual language.
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Many of his early works are based on historic American paintings, such as those of Benjamin West.
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But he also painted after such models as Picasso, Braque, & Klee, who according to his own words he worked into an “expressionist Cubism.”
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Lichtenstein even continued his takes on Picasso later on, once he had already begun to work with the half-tone dots.
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In his hands, Picasso’s works became a kind of comic.
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Painting a work that clearly resembled Picasso was, according to Lichtenstein, a liberating act.
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With his Perfect & Imperfect Paintings Lichtenstein wanted to create abstract works purely for their own sake.
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According to him, the idea was to let the line start at some point & then to follow it, thus allowing it to draw all of the shapes in the painting.
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In his “Perfect Paintings” the line ended at the edge of the canvas, while in the “Imperfect Paintings” the line went beyond the bounds of the canvas; this was in fact a humorous play on the idea of the “shaped canvases,” a trend in the 1960s.
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Lichtenstein’s large-scale paintings from the series “Brushstrokes” show nothing more than gigantic, stylised, comic-like brushstrokes on canvas.
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This motif has great significance in the history of art: it is a symbol of painting or indeed art & testifies to Lichtenstein’s reflections on paintings about painting.
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Lichtenstein also reworked classic motifs, such as the Laokoon group using stylised brushstrokes, sometimes applied to the canvas with stencils & sometimes by hand using expressive gestures.
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The brush stoke became the dominant motif & superimposed itself on the subject.
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So once again, his actual theme was painting as such.
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The artist also turned his mind to the classic genres of the still life & the landscape.
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His strongly simplifying style of painting allowed him to capture his subjects in a kind of cliché.
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