Roy Lichtenstein’s breakthrough as an artist came in 1961 at the age of thirty-eight when he painted Look Mickey (cat. no.8; Fig.84). It features Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse and, as the dialogue balloon suggests (‘Look Mickey, I’ve hooked a big one!!’), the artist was on to something momentous, a method he was to use for the rest of his career. Lichtenstein almost immediately became a leading Pop artist with a recognisable per-sonal style based on comics and advertising illustrations.

This exhibition, organised by Tate Modern, London, and the Art Institute of Chicago and opening this month at the National Gallery of Art, Washington (14th October to 6th January 2013), is the first major survey since the artist’s death in 1997, and includes works produced after a 1993 Guggenheim retrospective.1 The selection is excellent, although prints and multiples are excluded and some painting series, such as the Stretcher Frames and Monuments, are absent or represented only by a drawing or two. More significant than inclusions or exclusions is the revisionary approach taken by the curators, James Rondeau and Sheena Wagstaff, to counter the usual emphasis on Lichtenstein’s comic book paintings of the 1960s. They highlight lesser-known works, such as a group of early black-and-white paintings, and stress Lichtenstein’s conceptual consistency. In their view the artist is more than a central Pop figure who erases the line between fine art and popular culture, high and low: he is also a forerunner of postmodernism as an art of ‘appropriation, repetition, stylization and parody’. Since Lichtenstein relies on reproductions as source material, rejecting the notion that art represents reality or nature, he becomes the perfect artist for the age of mechanical reproduction. This is an understandable twenty-first-century perspective. Yet, as the curators note, Lichtenstein remains ‘an artist of absorbing contradictions’ (p.20). A conservative radical, he is always first and foremost a painter, whose primary concern is pictorial, not conceptual. He establishes his own originality by making what appear to be copies, and executes paintings by hand that imitate the impersonal look of mechanical processes.

Look Mickey appeared in Chicago (where this reviewer saw the exhibition) at the entrance to the first gallery, followed by three underwhelming Abstract Expressionist paintings from just before Look Mickey that suggest Lichtenstein’s pre-Pop floundering. In a bold curatorial move, these works were accompanied by four paintings from 1996 in which Lichtenstein painted actual expressionistic-style brushstrokes – not the brilliant earlier Pop versions of his Brushstroke paintings of 1965–71 – over geometric abstractions in a ‘Lichtensteinesque’ style. He said the idea for these late paintings, the Obliterating Brushstrokes, came in a dream. They suggest the return of the repressed, in the style he gave up and then parodied but always admired, now ‘overwriting’ his long-established personal style. Consciously acting on the dream, however, may be a sign that at last the artist felt able to joke about the hold Abstract Expressionism, like Cubism, always had on him.

Before Look Mickey and the Abstract Expressionist paintings, Lichtenstein had worked in a faux-naif style derived largely from Picasso, the artist who shadowed his entire career, and applied it to famous history paintings such as Emanuel Leutze’s Washington crossing the Delaware. The greatest paintings from Lichtenstein’s most popular period, such as Whaam! (no.36; Fig.85), show how far he moved, and moved art. The approach is representational yet contemporary, and as brash as can be. No wonder Lichtenstein’s art still epitomises the high spirits of the 1960s. Even as the curators try to move attention beyond the classic pictures of war and romance, those paintings remain the heart of Lichtenstein’s achievement.

Other works from the 1960s show Licht­enstein’s evolution, as he develops his dot technique and black-outline style, moves to a simplified colour scheme, and hones his selection and transformation of source material. They also suggest his sly use of allusion, his sidelong glances at other art. A 1962 painting of a golf ball is a Pop rendering of an ordinary object made monumental, but Lichtenstein said he intended his depiction of the ball’s surface dimples as a reference to Mondrian’s Plus and Minus paintings (later to be the subject of explicit parody in the late 1980s). Lichtenstein’s affinity with Op art and interest in optical effects and perception is also clear when he turns to landscapes. Working from cartoon backgrounds, he exploits – and explodes – the sentimental clichés, and uses scrims and odd materials such as Rowlux, a lenticular plastic, to play with the perception of colour, light and motion, reaching a climax in the newly restored Three landscapes from 1970–71 (no.60), a three-screen 35 mm. movie installation.

Lichtenstein’s engagement with other artists and movements also appears in two examples from his Entablature series. These extended horizontal paintings based on Neo-classical architectural elements are in part a response to Minimalism and the work of Donald Judd and Kenneth Noland. Placing them near the exhibition entrance in Chic­ago, in a transitional space leading from a Neo-classical court, was at once a witty contextualisation and a sign of how the exhibition’s aesthetic-conceptual emphasis subtly depoliticises Lichtenstein: the artist said that the Entablatures represent imperial power and, in a humorous way, the establishment and the Greco-Roman tradition.

Lichtenstein’s sensibility is perhaps most fully expressed through his parodies, many presented as a large group under the title ‘Art History’. In general, they display good-humoured affection and playfulness rather than a more aggressive attitude. Parody is one response to the anxiety of influence; it offers relief – comic relief – from the burden of the past, and the need for originality. After the comic-book period, Lichtenstein took on one style after another, in effect giving each the Lichtenstein treatment, from Art Deco, which gave rise to his most inventive sculptures, to Song dynasty landscapes, which resulted in a virtuoso display of his dot technique. His parodies are often technically masterly and extremely funny, but the jokes can wear thin. Two large works in a mock Expressionist style, one based on the Laocoön and the other on one of De Kooning’s Woman paintings, may be an oblique commentary on the Neo-Expressionism painting in fashion in the 1980s, but as parodies they suggest the danger in attempting to work on an epic scale: self-defeating grandiosity.

Lichtenstein was right to insist that he admired the artists whom he parodied; his real target was the hackneyed, debased pop­ularised versions. As the great parodist of Modernism, he may be both the last modernist and the first postmodernist. The Mirror series, a touchstone for the ‘conceptual’ Lichtenstein, follows Lichtensteinian principles not by attempting to depict actual mirrors but by revealing how mirroring is represented, through codes: visual reflectivity meets artistic reflexivity. Although based on run-of-the-mill commercial illustrations, these elegant paintings exist in a cool, rarefied realm. Whatever their virtues, there is no denying that compared with the best of the comic-book series, the crowd-pleasing qualities that made ‘Pop’ genuinely popular have disappeared.

Lichtenstein’s self-referentiality appears early, even if Donald Duck’s exclamation in Look Mickey is not the artist’s self-aware proclamation of a career-changing discovery. In Masterpiece (no.29; Fig.87), made only a year after Look Mickey, an attractive blonde tells the rock-jawed young man with whom she is viewing a painting: ‘Why Brad darling this painting is a masterpiece! My, soon you’ll have all of new york clamoring for your work!’. Roughly a decade later, Lichtenstein created a quartet of large artists’ studio paintings – here shown together for the first time since the inaugural presentation at Leo Castelli in 1974. They pay tribute to Matisse as parody-homages, but incorporate Licht­enstein paintings such as Look Mickey, thus staking the artist’s own claim to an important position within the history of painting.

Lichtenstein was at work on a series of nudes when he died. They return to comic-book and commercial ad imagery, but with several changes: the women are unclothed; the dots are set free of the physical forms; the black outlines and limited colour palette have given way to what the artist called ‘a poly­phony of colors that is nuts but works’. For all their art-historical and self-referential density, these appear curiously innocent, lyrical paintings, if Venusberg can be an innocent place: the tone is uncertain.

What is certain is that Lichtenstein never ‘hooked a big one’ again. It is somehow appropriate that his last completed painting (no.120; Fig.86) shows a female disappearing beyond the border of the canvas, a fugitive figure created by an elusive as well as allusive artist. Even in retrospect it is not clear whether the Nudes represent a confident, energetic late refinement of his early breakthrough work, or a sad, exhausted return with minor formal revisions to the scene of his early success. One painting left incomplete at the artist’s death was Mickasso, based on Picasso’s Harlequin with a guitar of 1918 but with Mickey Mouse’s hand playing the instrument.

1    After Washington, the exhibition moves to Tate Modern, London (21st February to 27th May) and the Centre Pompidou, Paris (3rd July to 4th November). Catalogue: Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective. By James Rondeau and Sheena Wagstaff, with contributions by Clare Bell et al. 368 pp. incl. 283 col. + 30 b. & w. ills. (Art Institute of Chicago in association with Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2012), $65. ISBN 978–0–300–17971–2.