By blending high and low art, Roy Lichtenstein tested the
contradictions at the heart of our ideas about art. He was
labelled a heretic, but half a century later, we get the joke In
November 2011, Roy Lichtenstein’s 1961 I Can See the Whole Room
… and There’s Nobody in It! was sold by Christie’s for $43.2
million. The painting depicts a large back square, out of which
a circle has been cut. From behind the circle peers the face of
a jutting-jawed comic-strip man, illuminated by a bright
background of yellow. He is looking through a peephole, at the
viewer; above him a dialogue bubble declares that he can see no
one in the room where we, presumably, are standing. The irony
shoots in many directions, not least towards that perennial
question demanded of modern art: is there any there there?
Painted in the same year as his breakthrough Look Mickey, the
work in which Lichtenstein first discovered the possibilities of
using cartoons and comic strips, I Can See the Whole Room … and
There’s Nobody in It! encapsulate