This portrait is of a ferocious German submarine commander from the 1940s who is about to launch a torpedo at a ship he is viewing through his periscope. The painting is one of Roy Lichtenstein's earlier Pop Art paintings done during the period when he was producing war pictures from comic books.
• Lichtenstein was one of a small group of artists in the 1960s who suddenly became noticed as important artists. Their paintings and sculptures were called "Pop Art" because their ideas came from the popular culture of advertising, everyday commercial products and comic books. Some people called Lichtenstein an "image duplicator" because he found his ideas in pictures that already existed, The power of Pop Art was so great that some art critics have declared that it forever "changed the look of art."
• As a boy living in Manhattan, N.Y., Roy Lichtenstein was interested in art and was attending Saturday-morning art classes by the time he was 14. Eventually, he studied at Ohio State University, where he earned bachelor's and master's degrees in painting. After teaching painting for several years at two colleges, he became a full-time artist.
• Not until he was 37, after many years of experimentation, did he discover his distinctive painting style. Interestingly, his earliest Pop paintings were done to entertain his children and included such cartoon characters as Popeye, Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse. Later, his ideas--like the one in this painting--came from comic-book cartoons on war themes. Other ideas followed, and he also made ceramics and metal sculptures as well as paintings.
• While some European artists had been producing art that was quite like Pop Art, the style reached its highest level among artists working in New York City. While Pop Art only lasted a few years, it continues to be imitated by artists and designers. Critics and historians continue to write about its influence on more recent artistic styles, particularly on a style of art called "Post Modernism."
• Other important Pop artists include Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, Claus Oldenburg, Tom Wesselman, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenburg. Their styles are all different, but they all shocked viewers at the time by using ideas from everyday commercial products and advertising.
• One thing that makes much Pop Art look very up-to-date compared with art that was done earlier is that objects often fill and even overflow the whole painting, very much like the way scenes are shown on movie and TV screens.
• To give students some idea of the value some people placed on Lichtenstein's art they may like to know that, when the picture reproduced here was sold at auction, the buyer paid $5.5 million dollars for it.
• For students to have a solid understanding of Pop Art, they need to see as many examples of it as possible and learn how they came to be created. Some of these studies should include other paintings by Lichtenstein, as well as work by some of the other Pop artists listed above. If the school library doesn't have enough reproductions, local libraries will be able to help with books and videotapes on individual artists, as well as the whole Pop Art movement.
• Because of the way Lichtenstein worked, students can practice imitating exactly how he did it by selecting images from present-day commercial and advertising art. They first need to find a comic-book picture they like and copy it fairly accurately. They should then project the drawing onto a large sheet of paper using an opaque projector and draw over the projection, while making any changes they think might make an improvement. If an opaque projector is not available, students can enlarge their sketch using large scale squares. Alternatively, they might photograph their sketch and project a slide of it to fill a sheet of paper. Finally, they should paint the picture using black and bright, simplified colors like those used in comic-book frames, while altering the colors wherever that would make the picture better.
• Students may be interested in putting themselves in the same position as other Pop Artists of the 1960s who found their inspiration in the products and advertisements of their time. Present-day students, however, would be looking around for examples of images from consumer culture that surrounds us today and use examples of them as starting points for their own Pop Art.
Because most people do not like to look at anything that is unusual, students who try this update of Pop Art should be prepared to have their work criticized. For this reason, they should protect themselves by learning as much as possible about the intentions of the original Pop artists.
• Lichtenstein used a very simplified style for this painting and yet he is able to capture the furious expression of the demented captain as he glares through the periscope. Students may be interested in testing their skills in showing facial expressions with just a few lines by finding a photograph of a person expressing strong emotion and trying to translate it into the kind of simplified style used here. Even better, they might like to enlarge their own drawing many times over compared with the original photograph, although they might be wise to make several smaller sketches before filling an area as large as Lichtenstein's painting.
• Art is always created when many other events are taking place. It newer happens by itself. Students only need to read a daily newspaper or watch TV news to know about many serious things that are happening in the world right now.
The news of the early '60s was equally serious; if students want: to develop a clearer understanding of how artists may have felt at that time, they may want to learn about some of the major problems that people faced then: The Cold War was just beginning and the Cuban Missile Crisis could easily have sparked another world war, the Space Program that led to the moon landings had just begun while, at home, the Civil Rights Movement was gathering strength.
This painting may be used to illustrate various art-teaching needs. Potentially useful picture-file categories include: "Pop Artists: Roy Lichtenstein"; "Portraits: Savage Faces"; "Adventure Pictures"; and "Large Pictures."
For ideas about collecting and retrieving pictures to help in teaching art and other subjects, readers are invited to write to: Guy Hubbard c/o Arts & Activities, 591 Camino de la Reina, Suite 200, San Diego, CA 92108; e-mail: hubbard@indiana.edu.
The original idea for this painting came from a comicbook story called "Battle of the Ghost Ships!" that had been published shortly before Lichtenstein translated one frame into the picture reproduced here. The story told about a World War II German submarine that was doomed to torpedo the same ship over and over again and, in doing so, driving the submarine captain mad.
The original panel from the comic book showed much the same scene as we see in the final painting. The differences are that two balloons containing speech in the original filled about half of the illustration. The captain was saying that he recognized the boat he was looking at, while the sailor is suggesting that it might be another ship with the same number.
Lichtenstein simplified the composition by removing all the words except for the command to prepare to fire a torpedo. He also made the submarine commander glare through the periscope with his right eye so that it could be seen more easily. The inclusion of a staring single eye was frequently used by the artist for maximum effect.
In the original illustration, the right eye was closed as the captain squinted through the periscope with his left eye. Also in the original, the captain has his mouth almost closed, while Lichtentstein's portrait shows him with his mouth wide open, snarling the order to load the torpedo. Another change from the original is that the artist moved the scar that had originally been on the captain's nose to his cheek, so it could be seen more easily.
While it is easy to see that the two pictures are alike, the painting is far more violent than the comic illustration. In the painting, the captain's face fills most of the space with a raging--almost insane-expression. Unlike the works of most other artists, however, Lichtenstein draws the face with the least number of lines possible and almost without any shading except harsh black.
The rippling black shadow down the right side of his face suggests that the captain is sweating inside the submarine and also that he is being lit by lamps shining from different directions. Adding to the tension in the face is the tight grasp of the captain's fingers around the handle of the periscope. Lichtenstein also added cables and dials to make the submarine interior look more convincing.
Solid black lines and shapes of the comic-book style dominate the painting, although a few areas of bright color are added. Other spaces are filled with a pale pinkish-blue color made with patterns of specially prepared dots that make the picture look even more mechanically produced than the original illustration.
The use of dots is a feature that is repeated in many of Lichtenstein's paintings and is derived from the way much commercial printing is done, especially newspaper illustrations. Pictures are photographed through screens that convert everything into dots that are often called "halftones." The dots are most noticeable in areas covered with lighter grays or pale colors.
In keeping with the ideas of Pop Art: where artists imitated mechanical methods of reproduction, Lichtenstein painted evenly spaced dots called "Benday dots" to show shading. Benday dots were made mechanically using a metal stencil in which holes were evenly spaced. Paint was spread over the stencil with a roller and then a scrub brush was used to push the paint: through the holes and onto the canvas. As time went by, the artist had assistants paint these dots instead of making them himself.
Hand-stenciled dots are used for the spaces in this painting that lie between the solid black and brightly colored areas to fill in areas and make the painting look more complete. The Benday dots used here are quite small, although in later work Lichtenstein often used dots that were much larger and more brightly colored.
Another major difference between the original illustration and the painting is its scale. The comicbook illustration was just one panel among many on a page of a magazine and it measured about 2″ x 3″ in size. In contrast, this painting measures 68″ x 80″ (5′ 8″ x 6′ 8″). It is no longer a frame in a picture story from a comic book, but has become a larger-than-life-portrait. It remains extremely simplified but, because of its size, it overwhelms people who see it. To get: an idea of how big it is, students might like to pin sheets of newspaper on a wall to match the size of the painting.
Large-scale, aggressive, military-action paintings were the first ones to be painted in Lichtenstein's final Pop Art style during the early 1960s. For several years, he continued to produce paintings of fighter pilots in action and machine gunners blasting at enemies. He then turned his attention to quite a different theme that focused on teen-age romances, often showing tearful young girls who were upset with their boyfriends.
As time went on, Lichtenstein experimented with numbers of other subjects. One of the subjects, which became a kind of signature, was unusual in that the entire artwork would feature nothing more than enormous Pop-Art images of splashy brushstrokes. These works were sometimes produced as paintings and other times as large pieces of outdoor sculpture.
PHOTO (COLOR): Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997). Torpedo... Los, 1963. Oil on canvas; 68″ x 80″. ©Estate of Roy Lichtenstein.
By Guy Hubbard
