| Artist: | Lichtenstein, Roy |
|
|---|---|---|
| Title: | Whaam! | |
| Date: | 1963 | |
| Nationality: | American | |
| Context: | Pop Art | |
| Movement: | Pop Art | |
| Materials: | acrylic paint on canvas | |
| Subject: appropriated image from war comics; takes an individual frame out of the fuller narrative context and freeze-frames it. Even war becomes a cliche here, a code of macho heroics that is what we raise children on (today more through computer games than comic books); violence in the media; simulated war games. Style: simulates a mechanical process of image reproduction; appropriates from the war comics;but alters the source by stylizing the image and focusing on formal issues more than narrative; anti-painterly, anti-subjective; de-personalized Context: age of mass media and mechanical reproduction; late capitalist materialism and commodity culture where behavior codes are modeled on TV and film; the heroic degraded; WWII seems far in the past now, like a different generation as the baby boomers simulate the "romance" of war. | ||
