For the first time since its inception, a European country has won the Oscar for best foreign film. Lichtenstein’s “The Kiss” is a romantic comedy about two people who meet in a supermarket and fall in love over a single kiss. The film’s director, Piotr Smolarek, says he was surprised by how much the story resonated with audiences around the world.
The roy lichtenstein is a film that tells the story of a young couple who meet in an elevator and fall madly in love. It’s been called one of the most romantic films ever made, and it won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1990.
“A kiss is only a kiss,” Louis Armstrong sang in the 1942 film “As Time Goes By” – unless it’s a Roy Lichtenstein picture of a kiss. Then it’s more than just a kiss. It was a huge deal, selling for $31.1 million at Christie’s. And, as outrageous as that price was for what amounted to a traced comic book picture, it was the least expensive of all his other artworks derived from comic books.
Best-selling item
The most expensive works by Roy Lichtenstein were featured in the current issue of Art News, with an article titled “The Most Expensive Works by Roy Lichtenstein” about a painting he dubbed “Masterpiece.” It sold for $165 million and was painted in his signature comic-book manner.
What’s the angle there? Consider the sale of a Rembrandt self-portrait for $18.7 million last year.
And, only a few weeks ago, the auction news site Timaxglobal published a list of the most expensive paintings by any artist, with Lichtenstein’s Masterpiece topping the list. Not bad for an artist whose work was deemed unoriginal by Life Magazine in a 1964 story titled “Is He the Worst Artist in the United States?”
Compare the $165 million sale of “Masterpiece” to the $6.6 million sale in July of JMW Turner’s “Purfleet on the Essex Shore” and the $3.4 million sale in July of Anthony van Dyke’s “Family Portrait of the Painter Cornelis de Vos and his wife Suzanna Cock and their two children.”
Hard look
The record-breaking buying price of “Masterpiece” necessitates a closer examination of what it depicts, but a cursory glance suffices: “Brad dear, this painting is a masterpiece!” the lady exclaims as they gaze at a canvas out of our view.
Soon, all of New York will be screaming for your work.” What did Lichtenstein say in this photograph?
My opinion is that he was mocking the art world for considering his work to be art. In the end, the lady in his photograph was correct. The artwork became the most valuable of his whole body of work. No less for a leg-pulling. Whose leg is it?
Probably art critics who are interested in his work.
In 2014, art critic Alastair Sooke dubbed him “a contemporary master,” claiming that his cartoons’ “cold, detached” air “rejects the overheated gestural spontaneity of Lichtenstein’s immediate predecessors” – the Abstract-Expressionists.
Exceptional praise
In his assessment of the artist’s retrospective at Tate Modern in 2013, art critic Adrian Searle of The Guardian viewed “Masterpiece” as much more than a yuk.
He described Masterpiece as “aspirational” when it initially went on exhibit at New York’s Leo Castelli Gallery.
But, wasn’t it more than wishful thinking? Wasn’t it Lichtenstein who made a remark about how easily empty-headed works like his get applauded? After all, didn’t he once declare that his work is “anti-contemplative”? Isn’t it a very good description of Pop Art? What else might account for Warhol’s Brillo boxes?
Searle, on the other hand, saw meaning in Lichtenstein’s cartoons, claiming that they “deflated the masculine aura” of Abstract Expressionism with simple images. Searle went even farther, implying that the cartoons had “psychological consequences.”
But wait, after Searle finished his analysis of the Tate retrospective, he reversed himself and stated that Lichtenstein was “pretty much all style and manner.” “I felt bludgeoned by his arch-sophistication; his detachment becomes a cold, elegant frost,” he said.
It’s difficult to understand how skin-deep photographs can make you feel beaten down.
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