How does this artwork elucidate its Background?
In 1943 Lichtenstein left his study of painting and drawing at Ohio State University to serve in the U.S. Army, where he remained until January 1946. After entering training programs for languages, engineering, and piloting, all of which were canceled, he served as an orderly, draftsman and artist in noncombat roles. One of his duties at Camp Shelby was enlarging Bill Mauldin's Stars and Stripes cartoons. He was sent to Europe with an engineer battalion, but did not see active combat. As a painter, he eventually settled on an abstract-expressionist style with parodist elements. Around 1958 he began to incorporate hidden images of cartoon characters such as Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny into his abstract works.A new generation of artists emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s with a more objective, "cool" approach characterized by the art movements known today as minimalism, hard-edge painting, color field painting, the neo-Dada movement, Fluxus, and pop art, all of which re-defined the avant-garde contemporary art of the time. Pop art and neo-Dada re-introduced and changed the use of imagery by appropriating subject matter from commercial art, consumer goods, art history and mainstream culture. Lichtenstein achieved international recognition during the 1960s as one of the initiators of the pop art movement in America. Regarding his use of imagery MoMA curator Bernice Rose observed that Lichtenstein was interested in "challenging the notion of originality as it prevailed at that time."
Lichtenstein's early comics-based works such as Look Mickey focused on popular animated characters. By 1963 he had progressed to more serious, dramatic subject matter, typically focusing on romantic situations or war scenes. Comic books as a genre were held in low esteem at the time. Public antipathy led in 1954 to examination of alleged connections between comic books and youth crime during Senate investigations into juvenile delinquency; by the end of that decade, comic books were regarded as material of "the lowest commercial and intellectual kind", according to Mark Thistlethwaite of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Lichtenstein was not a comic-book enthusiast as a youth, but was enticed as an artist by the challenge of creating art based on a subject remote from the typical "artistic image". Lichtenstein admitted he was "very excited about, and very interested in, the highly emotional content yet detached impersonal handling of love, hate, war, etc., in these cartoon images."Lichtenstein's romance and war comic-based works took heroic subjects from small source panels and monumentalized them. Whaam! is comparable in size to the generally large canvases painted at that time by the abstract expressionists. It is one of Lichtenstein's many works with an aeronautical theme. He said that "the heroes depicted in comic books are fascist types, but I don't take them seriously in these paintings—maybe there is a point in not taking them seriously, a political point. I use them for purely formal reasons."
youth crime in Look Mickey MoMA Pop art Stars and Stripes Bill Mauldin avant-garde Camp Shelby abstract-expressionist canvas hard-edge painting x war minimalism Fluxus Ohio State University pop art comic-book juvenile delinquency Mickey Mouse art movement Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth Whaam! left Senate investigations into juvenile delinquency Bernice Rose Bugs Bunny color field appropriating neo-Dada