Focus on this artwork and explore the Analysis and interpretation.
For José Pierre, Whaam! represents Lichtenstein's 1963 expansion "into the 'epic' vein". Keith Roberts, in a 1968 Burlington Magazine article, described the explosion as combining "art nouveau elegance with a nervous energy reminiscent of Abstract Expressionism". Wendy Steiner believes the work is Lichtenstein's most successful and harmonious comic-based composition. She sees the narrative and graphic elements as complementary: the action and spatial alignment lead the viewer's eye from left to right so as to emphasize the relationship between the action and its explosive consequence. The ellipses of the text balloon present a progression which culminates with a "WHAAM!". The "coincidence of pictorial and verbal order" are clear for the Western viewer with the explanatory text beginning in the upper left and action vector moving from the left foreground to the right background, culminating in a graphical explosion in tandem with a narrative exclamation. Steiner says the striking incongruity of the two panels—the left panel appearing to be "truncated", while the right depicts a centralized explosion—enhances the work's narrative power.
Lichtenstein's technique has been characterized by Ernst A. Busche as "the enlargement and unification of his source material ... on the basis of strict artistic principles". Extracted from a larger narrative, the resulting stylized image became in some cases a "virtual abstraction". By recreating their minimalistic graphic techniques, Lichtenstein reinforced the artificial nature of comic strips and advertisements. Lichtenstein's magnification of his source material made his impersonally drawn motifs seem all the more empty. Busche also says that although a critique of modern industrial America may be read into these images, Lichtenstein "would appear to accept the environment as revealed by his reference material as part of American capitalist industrial culture".David McCarthy contrasted Lichtenstein's "dispassionate, detached and oddly disembodied" presentation of aerial combat with the work of H.C. Westermann, for whom the experience of military service in World War II instilled a need to horrify and shock. In contrast, Lichtenstein registers his "comment on American civilization" by scaling up inches-high comic book images to the oversized dimensions of history painting. Laura Brandon saw an attempt to convey "the trivialization of culture endemic in contemporary American life" by depicting a shocking scene of combat as a banal Cold War act.Carol Strickland and John Boswell say that by magnifying the comic book panels to an enormous size with dots, "Lichtenstein slapped the viewer in the face with their triviality." H. H. Arnason noted that Whaam! presents "limited, flat colors and hard, precise drawing," which produce "a hard-edge subject painting that documents while it gently parodies the familiar hero images of modern America." The flat and highly finished style of planned brushstrokes can be seen as pop art's reaction against the looseness of abstract expressionism. Alastair Sooke says that the work can be interpreted as a symbolic self-portrait in which the pilot in the left panel represents Lichtenstein "vanquishing his competitors in a dramatic art-world dogfight" by firing a missile at the colorful "parody of abstract painting" in the right panel.According to Ernesto Priego, while the work adapts a comic-book source, the painting is neither a comic nor a comics panel, and "its meaning is solely referential and post hoc." It directs the attention of its audience to features such as genre and printing methods. Visually and narratively, the original panel was the climactic element of a dynamic page composition. Lichtenstein emphasizes the onomatopoeia while playing down articulated speech by removing the speech balloon. According to Priego, "by stripping the comics panel from its narrative context, Whaam! is representative in the realm of fine art of the preference of the image-icon over image-narrative".Whaam! is sometimes said to belong to the same anti-war genre as Picasso's Guernica, a suggestion dismissed by Bradford R. Collins. Instead, Collins views the painting as a revenge fantasy against Lichtenstein's first wife Isabel, conceived as it was during their bitter divorce battle (the couple separated in 1961 and divorced in 1965).
onomatopoeia in x war H.C. Westermann Alastair Sooke World War II pop art comic-book history painting text balloon Burlington Magazine Guernica post hoc Whaam! left Picasso