All language subtitles for roy-lichtenstein-pop-idol

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It's 1961. You are a mild-mannered,
frustrated 37-year-old art teacher,

whose career in art
is going nowhere.

You believe American art
has reached a cul-de-sac,

it doesn't reflect the
excitement of America.

You decide what DOES reflect that
excitement is comic-book art -

the imagery of the commercial world.

You apply high-art techniques
to this commercial imagery,

your paintings get shown
in a major gallery.

You are Roy Lichtenstein.

You have become
a major figure in American art.

You have changed the direction of
American art.

You have attained superpowers.

'Roy Lichtenstein, Pop Idol.

'See Roy's incredible
rags-to-riches story.

'The man who blew away the art world

'with his fabulous and super-cool
paintings and made millions.

'But it wasn't always
that way, folks.

'In the early years,

'Roy struggled against poverty,
obscurity and failure.

'How will Roy get out of this one?

'All this in Roy Lichtenstein,
Pop Idol.'

Roy Lichtenstein is best known for
his detached, ironic comic paintings

of chiselled-jawed men
and weeping girls.

When the work
first appeared in 1962,

it seemed someone had dragged the
images off the billboards outside

and stuck them up
on the walls of the gallery.

Lichtenstein challenged
people's conceptions of art

and, in doing so, became one of the
defining image-makers of the 1960s.

Roy Lichtenstein was born in 1923,

and grew up here
in the Upper West Side of New York,

when it was home to a community
of affluent Jewish emigres.

His father was a property developer
and his sister remembers

how they lived next door
to a well-known Russian composer.

There's a plaque there
to Rachmaninov.

I can remember we would sit
on the indoor steps -

the steps inside the building -
and listen to Rachmaninov practise.

But life in
the Lichtenstein home was quiet.

My mother was very funny,

but she kept her distance.

She wasn't emotional,

and I think not very
concerned about us.

Roy grew shy and withdrawn,
but quietly determined.

As a teenager, he felt the need
to spend more and more

time away from home, to escape
into an exciting new world.

'Roy develops an interest in jazz

'and spends his evenings
up in Harlem,

'listening to Count Basie
and Lester Young at the Apollo.

'These performances inspire
his first paintings,

'Picasso-style portraits
of jazz musicians.'

But his parents still
didn't take him seriously.

They didn't think he was destined
for greatness. I'm afraid not.

They though it would be a miracle
if he ever finished college,

and heaven knows
what he'd do after that.

When America joined
the Second World War,

all questions about
Roy's future were put on hold.

He was drafted into the Air Force.

But unlike the heroic
pilots he painted later,

he never got to fly a plane.

Instead, he landed
a desk job as a map maker.

Roy's artistic skills gained the
attention of his commanding officer,

who ordered him to copy newspaper
cartoons to stick on the mess wall.

Lichtenstein later remembered
finding the job stupid.

Cartoons weren't his idea of art.

At least, they weren't yet.

Roy finally got to
see some action in 1944,

when he was called up for
the Battle of the Bulge,

the largest American
offensive in the war.

He spoke about being in combat,
at one point, and it was incredible.

He was seeing incredible things
happening in the sky,

the sky lighting up,
the firing of the guns,

and he stood up.

Somebody grabbed him and
pulled him down, and said,

"You wanna get killed, you fool?!"

Because it was just so incredible.

He said that he was taken
by the beauty of it.

After Armistice, Roy was stationed
in Paris and visited the galleries.

By now, he was intent
on becoming an artist.

He even tried to visit
his hero, Picasso.

But his awe for the great master
was so great that he got scared

and ran away without even
knocking on the studio door.

Coming back to America
after the war,

retaining a youthful
belief in the power of art,

Lichtenstein seemed a long way from
the irritant who, 15 years later,

was vandalising galleries with
what appeared to be anti-art.

In 1946, he enrolled at Ohio
State University, majoring in art.

Sculptor Tom Doyle
was there with him.

Everyone knew he was going to
be a champ, you know what I mean?

Because he was like the star
of the art department out there.

I mean, he was just so...so
different than everybody there.

He had that kind of
knowing something,

like he knew something you didn't,
you know what I mean?

It's like someone who has a secret.

Already, Roy was known
for his satirical humour,

poking fun at American institutional
life, particularly the military.

We were in a class, a drawing class,
when MacArthur resigned

and made that great speech,

"Old soldiers never die,
they just fade away."

And Roy and I laughed like hell!
We were laughing.

And all the other students were
just horrified that we're laughing

at this great general, you know.

This playfulness features
in Roy's early work.

Superficially, this painting

may look like another
art-school Picasso imitation,

but look closely in
the top left-hand corner

and you can see that it's taken
from an advert for corned beef.

In the year 1954,

I was assigned to write about
an artist called Roy Lichtenstein,

whom I had never heard of before,

nor had anybody else.

There was a picture
of a dollar bill,

and there was a picture of George
Washington crossing the Delaware,

but these relatively
vulgar subjects were executed

in a kind of tired, you know,
modern-art-school style.

Lichtenstein seems only a step
away from his later pop work.

He had to shed
the self-consciously arty style

in which he painted these commercial
images. But he wasn't ready.

Nor was the art world, then in
the grip of abstract expressionism.

Its major figures - Mark Rothko,
Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning -

were like a holy trinity of gloom.

The images of everyday life
were rejected as inadequate

for representing the tragedy
of the human condition,

and were replaced with

wild and expressive splashes
and sweeps of paint.

In 1949, an article
in Life magazine called Pollock

"the greatest artist in America".

Ever since then,
most younger avant-garde painters

imitated his expressive style.

By comparison,
Lichtenstein's early work

seems stubbornly childish.

At odds with the art scene,

the champ of Ohio State College
slipped out of the limelight.

He'd married in 1949, and he
and his wife, Isabel, had two sons.

Lichtenstein could only
find work teaching in Oswego,

right up in the mountains
by the Canadian border.

It was not a good move.

He had the kids, you know,
and he had the dog,

but it didn't seem...

I don't know, it seems like he was
kind of, like, floating or something.

I didn't feel like
he was all that happy.

And of course she wasn't happy.

I mean, she was really unhappy
when they went to Oswego, you know,

because no-one would
ever visit them there.

It's like way to hell...

It's like Siberia, or something.

Isabel became depressed
and turned to alcohol.

In the evenings,
Roy took refuge in his studio.

But knowing that his style was
at odds with the mood of the times,

he was suffering an identity crisis.

What should he paint?

Craving success and recognition,

he began dabbling
in abstract expressionism.

It was a compromise,
and the paintings from this time

lack the energy and gentle
humour of his best work.

Well, I think he never really was

interested in the abstract
expressionist paintings

that he was doing. I think
they probably felt false to him,

but he did feel as if
he was stuck in the boondocks,

and he was.

But Roy was secretly working
on something quite different.

To his mind, American society was
in a state of rapid change,

and he wanted to
reflect this in his work.

Enjoying economic boom,

the country was at the beginning
of its obsession with consumerism.

The images in people's lives were
no longer those in the art gallery,

but those on television,
billboards and in comic books.

Lichtenstein instinctively felt

that art must come out
of its ivory tower,

and respond to this
visual challenge.

In a series of sketches
from the late 1950s,

he began to experiment with
familiar cartoon characters.

'I was doing them

'sort of immersed
in abstract expressionism.

'It was a kind of
abstract expressionist image

'with these cartoons
within this expressionist image.

'It's a little hard
to picture, I think,

'and the paintings themselves
weren't very successful.'

He was right,
they weren't successful.

He had yet to find a way of using
the images of the commercial world

without concealing them
in the house style of American art.

So, for the time being, he continued
with his lightweight abstract work.

Throughout the '50s,
Lichtenstein's determined quest

to get the attention of
the art world was going nowhere.

Every gambit he tried,
every tack he pursued

was greeted with lukewarm response.

As 1960 approached,
and he was in his late 30s,

he was getting desperate.

As the new decade began,
Lichtenstein's luck changed.

He got a teaching post at Douglas
College, just outside New York.

He was back at the heart of
the avant-garde art scene.

Now he could see that there
were other artists like him,

sick of abstract expressionism,

and keen to engage
with the world around them.

In Flag, Jasper Johns took

America's most beloved image

and presented it in faded tones,

looking ragged and worn.

Robert Rauschenberg
embraced materials

traditionally outside
of the artist's reach,

using newspaper
and magazine cuttings

to add texture to
the background of his work.

An underground art scene
based at Douglas College

had begun live performances
or happenings

which did much to challenge
people's conceptions

of what was and was not art.

Change was in the air.

This move also shook up
Lichtenstein's personal life,

and he separated from Isabel.

Letty Lou Eisenhauer became
a close friend and later his lover.

He came to Douglas
and he met all of these people

who had a whole different
vision of what art was.

It took him a while to
acclimate and then, I think,

he slowly began to move
in a new direction.

I think he was beginning to see
that there was something else there

that you could make art out of,
besides abstract ideas.

Lichtenstein realised
that his abstract painting

had taken him down
a creative cul-de-sac.

Seeing how dated his work was

in comparison with other New York
artists, he had a breakthrough.

One day, in the spring of 1961,

he returned to the cartoon imagery
he'd been toying with for so long.

But this time, he was to do
something very unusual.

'In doing these paintings,

'I had, of course, the original
strip cartoons to look at,

'and the idea of doing one
without apparent alteration

'just occurred to me.

'I did one really almost
half seriously,

'only to get an idea
of what it might look like,

'and I kind of got interested in
organising it as a painting, really,

'and brought it to
some kind of conclusiveness

'as an aesthetic statement,

'which I really hadn't
intended to do to begin with.'

The result of this
experimentation was Look, Mickey.

If the apparently unaltered cartoon
image didn't represent a manifesto

for a new art form in itself,
then the text made it clear.

Roy, in the guise of Donald Duck,

was telling the world
he was onto something big.

But while the painting was bold,

Roy's characteristic caution
made him hesitant.

I was with Roy, and we were in
the car going to pick up some beer,

and Roy is telling me about
the Donald Duck painting.

And I'm saying,
"Yeah, yeah, turn here.

"Stop there,
so I can get the beer."

And he's saying,
"What do you think of this idea?"

He wasn't sure
whether it was art or not.

The curious thing, he said, is that
when he looked at this painting,

he was appalled by it,

and that, in a way, he had
to get beyond his own taste

to be able to continue to do that,

because it looked so unlike art.

But Roy overcame his reservations
and, during the summer of 1961,

worked at a feverish pace on

the first of what are now
called his Pop Paintings.

He copied the images of newspaper
adverts and comic strips,

and the techniques
by which they are created.

The wild gestural brushstroke
of the abstract expressionists

gave way to
a simple illustrative line.

His palette was restricted to
one or two primary colours,

and sometimes no colours at all.

He increasingly abandoned
the paintbrush

in favour of stencils and rollers.

The work looked as if
it was created by a machine

rather than a human being.

Miniature Ben-Day dots are used
in newspaper advertisements

in various densities

to create the illusion of
modelling in light and shadow.

Lichtenstein enlarged them
to an absurd degree,

and they became his signature.

They demonstrated how he relished
the drama of abstraction,

but transformed it into a cartoon.

But while Lichtenstein
had managed to convince himself,

would he be able to convince others?

The Castelli Gallery,
here on the Upper East Side,

was one of the most important
galleries in New York at the time.

Leo Castelli had made

Robert Rauschenberg
and Jasper Johns famous.

If Roy got a show here,
this new art might take off.

At the time, Ivan Karp
was Castelli's right-hand man.

A friend called him

and asked him to look
at the work of Roy Lichtenstein.

On the landing,
just before the gallery levelled,

was this young man standing
in front of a number of canvasses.

I said, "Are you the person who was
sent by my friend out in New Jersey?"

He said, "Yes, I'm Roy Lichtenstein."

I asked Mr Lichtenstein to deploy his
works in the gallery,

wherever spaces there were,

between the paintings on display,

and I had a rather
startling reaction.

I said something like,

"I'm not sure you're allowed
to do things like this!"

I think that was the phrase
that I issued forth at the time.

They were so startling and so
contrary to the general

prevailing current
of the art at the time,

and they were, in a sense,
immediately buoyant and refreshing.

I wanted Leo to see them.

And when Leo saw them,
he was not appalled.

He said, "This is so
dead-centre American, isn't it?

"We'll leave some paintings here

"and see what kind of reaction
we get to them."

There was a certain buzz
in New York.

Unbeknownst to each other,
a number of different artists

started creating surprisingly
similar work

at exactly the same time.

An artist and a friend of his
came in,

and I took out the painting
of the beach-ball girl of Roy's,

and showed it to them,
and they were enthralled.

One of them who had a mop
of grey hair

and a very mottled complexion
said to me,

"I'm doing work
very, very much like this.

"Would you come
to my studio and look at it?"

It was a man named Andy Warhol.

Andy Warhol was known only as
a successful commercial illustrator.

In private, he's also made
some of his own cartoon paintings,

not unlike Lichtenstein's.

Through the autumn of 1961,
Roy waited on tenterhooks

as Castelli considered
the work of both artists.

He said it's between me and another
guy. I said, "Who's the other guy?"

And he says, "Andy Warhol." I said,
"Who in hell is Andy Warhol?!"

I'd never heard of Andy Warhol.

He does I Miller Shoe ads.
I said, "Forget about that guy!

"You'll never hear from him again!"

Leo Castelli found Warhol a little
too exotic as a personality,

and decided to do a show
of Lichtenstein's work alone.

Warhol realised that without
Castelli's patronage

he'd look like
a follower of Lichtenstein,

so he abandoned his cartoon work
and tried something different.

The result was the bold, graphically
enhanced Campbell's Soup cans.

The distinctive repetition

of this mundane everyday image
was to make Warhol famous.

And in the spring of 1962,

Lichtenstein had his legendary
debut at the Castelli gallery.

He'd hoped that
his work was unusual,

but he never anticipated
the outrage it would cause.

There was profound hostility to his
work in the formal arts press.

There was nobody, except possibly
Professor Robert Rosenblum,

who was positive about it.

When you first saw the works,
they looked unspeakably ugly,

which of course could be either
a point of fascination or repulsion.

You're really forced
to look at how creepy, strange,

a woman in a dishwasher ad
really looked.

I had just never seen
anything like it.

There was no place for me

to compare it to or rationalise

for or against it.

I was just confused, like I said.

And it was a very pleasant feeling.

Lichtenstein's intention
was not just to undermine

the hallowed notion of art.

For years, he'd searched for a way
of expressing his real self.

This was it.

The comic paintings hung on the wall
were cool, ironic, even fetishistic.

For Roy, a cool, ironic kind of guy,

this was the most honest and
personal form of expression

he could find.

Gone was the artist
as tortured mystic.

To his critics, the work
seemed a triumph of the banal.

Two collectors bought all the works,

at very humble prices,
as you can imagine.

Several hundred dollars
for a major painting.

But still, we considered it
that a remarkable success

that anybody at all would
buy these works.

They were so disconnected from
prevailing modes.

It was a shattering
new experience for people.

And so it was a commercial success
in that regard.

Lichtenstein's quest for
artistic success

had reached a crashing climax.

He was no longer the underdog.

People were paying attention.

He had outwitted Mickey Mouse.
He had beaten up Bluto.

He had done it by avoiding the
bullying tactics

of the abstract expressionists.

His tone and technique
were subtler and finer

and seemed to have
infinite possibilities.

As an artist, he could see clearly,

because he was now
the King of New York.

He was now the hero that
he'd always wanted to be.

Lichtenstein's success meant

he could afford studio space in
New York and assistants to help him.

The next few years were
his most productive period,

resulting in the war paintings
and Crying Girl series.

The comic-book paintings weren't
merely an indifferent,

manufactured exercise
in appropriation and objectivity.

They could be violent, melodramatic.

They were a stylistic
intensification

of the excitement that
the subjects had for him.

And they enabled him to play out
a series of satisfying fantasies.

Through the paintings,

he could tell stories
of his personal life

and his life as a painter.

I have a feeling that these
male figures are often Roy himself,

these handsome, gorgeous figures.

Roy wasn't handsome.

This is a fantasy
about who you want to be

and what you want -
the beautiful girl.

He got the beautiful girl.

You want the elegant life of
these people. You got that, then.

In the early '60s, there
was the end of his marriage,

there were girlfriends.

While the women in his life changed,

there was one consistent image
he painted - the crying girl.

Perhaps the girl in the paintings
was crying because of Lichtenstein's

disappointment
with the cliches of romantic love.

Or perhaps the girl was crying
because Roy Lichtenstein was saying,

"I want a beautiful girl to
cry over me

"in the way these girls are crying
over the men in their lives."

Then again, it's just possible
that Lichtenstein empathised more

with the submissive girls
than their heartbreaking hunks.

We had a game we used to play, where
I would burst through the door from

having come in from graduate school,

and say something like, "I'm
going to grab you and rape you!"

And he would go, "Ooh! Ooh! Ooh!"

And run around the room very
slowly so I could catch him.

In 1965, he was able to leave
behind the commercial imagery

that had satisfied all sorts of
psychological and artistic needs,

and return to high-art subjects.

The big brushstroke painting
tamed the passion and spontaneity

of expressionist brushstroke

into something cool and formally
elegant, into simply an image.

He had turned abstract
expressionism into a cartoon,

both as a kind of tribute,

but to announce that he'd
found a style all his own,

and he could do anything
with it that he wanted.

And that's just what he did.

For the next 30 years, he presented

a sort of history of the world
according to Roy Lichtenstein.

There were landscapes
with Ben-Day dots,

imitations of great artworks
with Ben-Day dots,

still lives with Ben-Day dots,
interiors with Ben-Day dots.

Some paintings seemed
to be just Ben-Day dots alone.

Meanwhile, Roy himself became
a well-known society figure -

elegant and reserved.

In 1968, he married again -

the beautiful Dorothy Herzka.

He finally had the Brad lifestyle
he'd always wanted.

He used to joke and say

someone's going to shake him
on the shoulders and say,

"Mr Lichtenstein, Mr Lichtenstein,
get up, it's time for your pills!"

and he'll have been in
a coma or something!

He'll still be living in Oswego!

But the more well-known Roy became,
the more difficult he was to read.

This self-portrait is revealing
in that it is NOT revealing.

His head is significantly
a mirror to the world around it,

reflecting nothing.

It was as if he wanted to keep
his personality out of his art.

Insofar as he had become Brad,
he was in danger of having

reduced his life and
his work to two dimensions.

He got an idea, did it, but then
he was unwilling to move on.

You can take the idea to
the next place, to a new step.

He didn't do that.

So was Lichtenstein
just a one-hit wonder,

intent on reducing
everything to a cartoon?

To his admirers, the concept
grew to become a style in itself,

like impressionism or cubism.

Jeff Koons is one of America's
most famous artists today,

largely because, like Lichtenstein,
he exploits commercial, pulp images.

Sometimes people say,
"He didn't change.

"It was always like
more of one line."

I think just the opposite.

I think, "Look at all the different
approaches he made to his work,

"going from very kind of
modernist-style paintings

"to the different
type of cartoon images

"to the two-dimensional sculptures,
but a very wide variety."

How do we make sense
of Roy Lichtenstein's career?

For me, his later works were
like good album tracks.

They're not as sexy,
as immediate, as his early pop hits.

But in a way, they're more absorbing
and definitely more mature.

I mean, look, this guy, all he ever
wanted to do was paint, right?

He worked his ass off, all the time.

That's all he ever did.

He liked cars, he liked to play
tennis a little bit, I guess, but...

I think he's a fantastic worker.

By the mid 1980s, Lichtenstein

was one of the most successful
artists in the world.

His public sculpture and murals

could be found all over
the United States.

The Lichtenstein style, once so
controversial, became mainstream.

His works were selling
for a vast amount.

In the '90s, Lichtenstein's
marriage to the establishment

was finally consummated with a major
commission for a series of prints

to go on the walls of
US embassies around the world.

I don't know what to say.
I'm completely overwhelmed.

Nobody screamed or got sick or
anything when it was unveiled, so...

thank you all tremendously.

Roy Lichtenstein never
cultivated a celebrity

in the way that
other pop artists did.

But he definitely had enough of an
ego to allow many everyday images

that he had turned into high art
to be returned to the commonplace,

to come off the gallery walls and
have a life in the outside world.

These tended to be items
produced in collaboration

with museums that were putting
on major Lichtenstein shows.

At the openings these shows,

Roy never would never wear one of
his ties, but Jasper Johns would.

In return, Roy would wear
a Jasper Johns tie.

I imagine now,
somewhere in New York,

Jeff Koons is having a cup of tea
out of a Roy Lichtenstein teapot.

In fact, Lichtenstein's
reputation has suffered because

of his extraordinary success.

His images are so widespread
that we forget how disconcerting

they were when they first appeared.

Pinnacle Art Press in New Jersey
are doing yet another run of posters

to satisfy the endless
market demand for his work.

I am the first pressman on this
machine. My son is my operator.

They are popular mainly
because of the bright colours.

There's a lot to look at,
there's things to read on it.

Overall, it's just
an eye-catching piece.

It's large.

It would look really nice framed up,

I think, along with
a couple of other ones.

"Why, Brad, darling,
this painting is a masterpiece!

"My, soon you'll have all of New
York clamouring for your work."

I like it.

I'd hang it on my wall.

By the time he died in 1997,

the one-time enfant terrible
of the New York scene

had become
the mellow old man of art.

The world of commerce that he had
plundered over 30 years before had

swallowed him back up and moved on.

While the world outside the gallery

has got more and more garish
and spectacular

since Lichtenstein had his big idea,
his work does retain its power.

He took American art out of the
gallery and into the everyday world.

Ironically, you now have to return
to the quiet of the gallery,

away from the commercial chaos
he slyly predicted,

to see that Roy Lichtenstein

produced some of
the best paintings of his time.