Roy Lichtenstein

At once reverential and confrontational, Roy Lichtenstein's Two Figures in a Landscape, 1977, is a quintessentially post-modern investigation into earlier art forms and a seminal milestone in the history of appropriation. Convinced of the abiding legitimacy of earlier art, between 1974 and 1980 Lichtenstein devoted his attention to the sustained exploration of three modern art movements: Futurism, Expressionism and Surrealism. Two Figures in a Landscape is one of his most accomplished investigations into the intellectual polish and dreamlike, ephemeral landscapes of the Surrealists, broadly referencing themes and motifs drawn from the works of René Magritte, Salvador Dali and Yves Tanguy in particular. Broadening the language and remit of Pop, he encompasses art historical referents into his work, each filtered through his idiosyncratic lens of schematised lines, primary colours and benday dots that he had honed to perfection in his Comic Strip paintings of the previous decade. 

Set against an empty desert vista redolent of the enigmatic, abandoned landscapes that came to characterise Tanguy's œuvre, two anthropomorphised accumulations of objects and fetishized body parts make up the figures of the title. With its long shadow, the figure in the foreground references the mannequins of Giorgio de Chirico, in which potentially useful objects are rendered useless by their incorporation into the human form. By comparison, the figure on the horizon, made up simply of an upturned eye and a shock of platinum hair, references the molten and liquid shapes that characterize Salvador Dali's paintings. Cast in a wordless and enigmatic narrative, Lichtenstein's dramatis personae juxtapose purported male attributes - the angular, active forms of the razorblade - with the curvilinear, passive forms of the female figure on the horizon. Just as historical Surrealism sought to expose psychological truth by stripping ordinary objects of their ordinary significance, so here Lichtenstein employs the visual pun of non sequitur juxtapositions to reiterate the poetics of his art historical precedent. In the same way that Merit Oppenheim's fur-covered teacup, Object, 1936, hijacked the meaning of a familiar object, Lichtenstein here incongruously recasts a razorblade in wood, thereby rendering its previous usage obsolete. At the same time, the wood-grain pattern winks in the direction of Magritte who used its texture in his compositions.

 Arguably the most complex pictures that Lichtenstein had created to date, it is important to understand the Surrealist compositions in context. Analysing Surrealism was a self-referential activity for Lichtenstein, because as a movement it was a major formative nutrient for the artist as a student. Throughout the 1930s, Surrealism gained acceptance and credence in America, with Tanguy moving to New York from Paris in 1939. By the 1940s, when Lichtenstein was at art school in Ohio, Surrealism was the matrix style for contemporary American abstract art. His 1950s compositions are fundamentally Surrealist in mindset, teeming with biomorphic plants and animals inhabiting dreamlike, nocturnal settings. In the present series, therefore, Lichtenstein meets his mentors head on.

 As with his earlier comic derived imagery, Lichtenstein does not indulge in rote duplication of his source images, but manipulates, reorganises and reframes his generalised imagery. As the present work demonstrates, there is not one precise source but several, each intuitively modified to assume a new role, making the art historical game of source-finding impossible. Rendered with the economy of line and visual clout that was the common currency of mass communication, the organic forms of historical Surrealism are reduced to an insistently flat amalgam of black lines and blocks of primary colour. As ever with Lichtenstein, his source is not the painting itself but a colour reproduction of the original, inevitably adulterated by the printing processes which inform his style. Gone is the European Old-Master patina of Surrealism, usurped by a pared-down, high colour Pop syntax anathema to the nuanced gradations and invisible brushstroke of Dali, for example. Paradoxically, however, Lichtenstein's diagrammatic rendering nonetheless belies the same exquisite draftsmanship and formal concern for colour that is intrinsic to the earlier artist's oeuvre.

The eye on the horizon is arguably the most exquisitely rendered part of the painting and the only instance where Lichtenstein employs his trademark benday dot. With great economy and subtlety, this draws our attention to the one human element in the picture. The eye was a symbolic and poetically loaded motif favoured by the Surrealists. Here the rotated eye takes on the form of a teardrop, recalling Dali's teardrops on the one hand, yet also Lichtenstein's own dewy eyed heroines from his comic strip paintings, such as the iconic Happy Tears, 1964. Fetishized and re-contextualised, the eye and hair become a coda for femininity, synecdochically referencing the heroines of his earlier comic-derived iconography. It is interesting that Lichtenstein simultaneously lifts motifs from Surrealism and from his own earlier work. For example, the horizontal brushstroke motif from his groundbreaking mid-1960s canvases is here reconfigured as a cloud in this fantastical landscape. This habit of appropriating his own iconography, which prefigured Warhol's Reversals and Retrospectives series, shows the artist's consciousness of his own artistic heritage and is demonstrative of his status by the late 1970s as an instantly recognizable artist in his own right.

By citing earlier art - be it his own or that of others - Lichtenstein establishes an 'art as art' dialogue that questions the notions of originality and authorship in art. This was a radical topic at the time and the year after Two Figures in a Landscape was made, the Whitney Museum of American Art staged a survey exhibition Art About Art which was organised by Jean Lipman and Richard Marshall to investigate the widespread parody and appropriation of history of art icons by artists since 1950. Needless to say, Lichtenstein was well represented in the exhibition. Dramatically prefiguring the appropriation mania that characterised the art of the 1980s, Two Figures in a Landscape signals Lichtenstein's intention to continue in the canon of art history while radically inflecting the symbolic values of his predecessors.