Whaam!

Not to be confused with Wham.

Whaam!
Artist	Roy Lichtenstein
Year	1963
Type	Pop art
Location	Tate Modern, London

Whaam! is a 1963 diptych painting by American artist Roy Lichtenstein. An iconic piece of pop art, it is widely regarded as one of Lichtenstein's most important and most influential works. It was exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City in 1963, and purchased by the Tate Gallery in London in 1966. It has been exhibited at Tate Modern since 2006.

Lichtenstein studied as an artist before and after serving in the United States Army in World War II as an orderly, draftsman, and artist. He practised anti-aircraft drills in his basic training, and he was sent for training as a pilot as part of his army service, but the program was cancelled before the training started. He was sent to Europe with an engineer battalion, but never saw active combat. He went on to create a broad array of military art, and he depicted aerial combat in several works. Whaam! is part of a series on war that he worked on between 1962 and 1964, and is one of two large war-themed paintings, the other being As I Opened Fire.

Whaam! portrays an explosion of flames as a fighter plane successfully shoots down another plane with an air-to-air missile. The image is derived from several comic book panels. Lichtenstein transformed his prototype—a single panel from a war comic published in 1962—by dividing the composition into two panels and altering the relationship of the various graphical and narrative elements. The work is admired for the temporal, spatial and psychological unity of its two panels, which Lichtenstein conceived as a contrasting pair. The painting's title is displayed in the oversized onomatopoeic caption in the right panel.

Lichtenstein has been criticized by some commentators for his failure to give credit or compensation to the comic book artists upon whose works his paintings were based. Despite controversy surrounding its artistic merit, originality and ethical propriety, Lichtenstein's comics-based work has since become popular with collectors and is now widely accepted.

Background

Lichtenstein left Ohio State University, where he had been studying painting and drawing, to serve in the United States Army between February 1943 and January 1946—during and after WWII. After entering training programs for languages, engineering, and pilot training, all of which were cancelled, he served as an orderly, draftsman, and artist in noncombat roles. Among his duties as an orderly at Camp Shelby was enlarging Bill Mauldin's Stars and Stripes cartoons.

According to Mark Thistlethwaite of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, by the late 1950s, artworks sourced from comic books were regarded in the US as "the lowest commercial and intellectual kind" as a result of public antipathy that led to the United States Senate investigations in early 1950s that studied connections between comics and juvenile delinquency. However, during the late 1950s and early 1960s, some American painters began to adapt the imagery and motifs of comic strips on canvas. Lichtenstein made drawings in 1958 of comic strip characters, and Andy Warhol produced his earliest paintings in the style in 1960. Lichtenstein, unaware of Warhol's work, produced Look Mickey and Popeye in 1961. He moved away from his earlier abstract expressionist works in 1961 to works based on cartoons, and within a few years these works took up more serious themes, such as romance and depictions of the armed forces in wartime. Lichtenstein said that at the time, "I was very excited about, and very interested in, the highly emotional content yet detached impersonal handling of love, hate, war, etc., in these cartoon images." It has been observed that the "simplicity and outdatedness [of comics] were ripe for being mocked".

Lichtenstein made many works with an aeronautical theme. He stated that he did not take his militaristic subjects seriously: "the heroes depicted in comic books are fascist types, but I don't take them seriously in these paintings—maybe there is a point in not taking them seriously, a political point. I use them for purely formal reasons." It has been suggested that the painting fits in the genre of protest against war, alongside with Picasso's Guernica, but this suggestion is dismissed by Bradford R. Collins: he considers it to be a revenge fantasy and vehicle for his anger towards his first wife Isabel while they were in the middle of a bitter divorce battle (they separated in 1961, and divorced in 1965).

Lichtenstein's romance and war comic-based works took comic book heroic subjects from a small panel on the page and depicted them on a monumental scale. The large dimensions of Whaam! are consistent with the generally large canvases in use at that time by the abstract expressionists. His collection of comic-inspired works from this period has been described by the Tate Gallery as "a fascinating, thought provoking and often witty compendium of images".

Lichtenstein had not been a comic book collector as a youth. His second wife, Dorothy, has claimed that Lichtenstein "was not a fan of comics and cartoons," but rather was enticed by the challenge of creating art based on a subject that was remote from the typical "artistic image".

History

Original comic book panel from All-American Men of War #89, January–February 1962 (DC Comics)

Whaam! adapts a comic-book panel drawn by Irv Novick from the "Star Jockey" story of the January–February 1962 DC Comics' All-American Men of War issue #89. A smaller, single panel oil painting made by Lichtenstein around the same time, Tex!, has a similar composition, with a similar plane at the lower left shooting a missile at a second plane that is exploding in the upper right, with a word bubble. The same issue of All American Men of War was the inspiration for at least three other Lichtenstein paintings, Okay, Hot-Shot, Brattata and Blam, in addition to Whaam! and Tex! The graphite pencil sketch, Jet Pilot was also from that issue.

The painting also omits the speech bubble in which the pilot exclaims "The enemy has become a flaming star!". Paul Gravett suggests that Lichtenstein substituted the attacking plane from the subsequent issue #90 (March–April 1962), from the story "Wingmate of Doom" illustrated by Jerry Grandenetti, and that he may have substituted the target plane with a Russ Heath drawing from the "Aces Wild" story in the same issue.

Some sources claim that Lichtenstein substituted this image for the attacking plane from the subsequent issue of All American Men Of War #90, March–April 1962 (DC Comics).

Lichtenstein held his first solo exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City, from February 10 to March 3, 1962. It sold out before its opening. The exhibition included Engagement Ring, Blam and The Refrigerator. According to the Lichtenstein Foundation website, Whaam! was part of Lichtenstein's second solo exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery from September 28 to October 24, 1963 that also included Drowning Girl, Baseball Manager, In the Car, Conversation, and Torpedo...Los!. Marketing materials for the show included the lithograph artwork, Crak!

Throughout the 1960s, Lichtenstein repeatedly depicted aerial combat between the United States and the Soviet Union. In the early and mid-1960s, he produced "explosion" sculptures, taking subjects such as the "catastrophic release of energy" from paintings such as Whaam! and depicting them in freestanding and relief forms. In 1963, Lichtenstein was parodying a variety of artworks, from "low art" commercial illustrations and comics and to "high art" modern masterpieces by Cézanne, Mondrian, Picasso and others. At this time in his career, Lichtenstein noted that "the things that I have apparently parodied I actually admire." Although the Lichtenstein Foundation website says that Lichtenstein did not begin using his opaque projector technique until the autumn of 1963, Lichtenstein described his process for producing comics based art as follows:

As directly as possible ... From a cartoon, photograph or whatever, I draw a small picture—the size that will fit into my opaque projector ... I don't draw a picture to reproduce it—I do it in order to recompose it ... I project the drawing onto the canvas and pencil it in and then I play around with the drawing until it satisfies me.

Whaam! was purchased by the Tate Gallery in 1966. In 1969, Lichtenstein donated what he called a "pencil scribble", his initial graphite on paper sketch entitled Drawing for 'Whaam!'. The painting has been displayed at Tate Modern since 2006. Both works were included as part of the largest-ever Lichtenstein retrospective that visited the Art Institute of Chicago from May 16 to September 3, 2012, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. from October 14, 2012 to January 13, 2013, the Tate Modern in London from February 21 to May 27, 2013 and The Centre Pompidou from July 3 to November 4, 2013. Richard Morphet, an art historian, was an assistant keeper at the Tate at the time that Whaam! was being contemplated for acquisition. Morphet suggested as justification for buying Whaam! that the painting seemed to address several issues at the same time. He enumerated "history painting, Baroque extravagance, and the quotidian phenomenon of mass-circulation comic strips."

Description

A pivotal work of the pop art movement, Whaam! depicts a fighter aircraft in the left panel firing a rocket into an enemy plane in the right plane, which is disintegrating in a red-and-yellow explosion. The cartoon style is heightened by the use of the onomatopoeic lettering "WHAAM!" in the right panel, and a yellow-boxed caption with black lettering at the top of the left panel. The textual exclamation "WHAAM!" can be considered the graphic equivalent of a sound effect (other onomatopoeic works by Lichtenstein include Bratatat! and Varoom!).

One of Lichtenstein's war series of images, it combines "brilliant color and narrative situation". The painting is large in scale, measuring 4.0 x 1.7 m (13 ft 4 in x 5 ft 7 in). Lichtenstein employed his usual comic book style: "Using bright primary colors with black and white, he outlined simplified forms, incorporating mechanical printer's Ben-Day dots and stereotyped imagery." Whaam! departs from Lichtenstein's earlier works such as Step-on-Can with Leg and Like New, in that the panels are not two variations of the same image.

Graphite pencil on paper sketch entitled, Drawing for 'Whaam!', 1963

Although Lichtenstein was inspired by, and strove to remain faithful to, the source images, he made the paintings in a traditional way, starting with a sketch which he adjusted to improve the composition and then projected on to a canvas to make the finished painting. In the case of Whaam!, the sketch is on two piece of papers, and the finished work is painted with Magna acrylic and oil paint on canvas. It was originally conceived as a single panel but evolved into a diptych. The sketch suggests that the "WHAAM!" motif would be coloured white, although it is yellow in the finished work. The Ben-Day dots in the final painting were created using a metal screen.

The original source was one panel, but Lichtenstein split the work into two panels to reinforce the separation of action and result. The left panel features the attacking plane—placed at a diagonal to create a sense of depth—below the text balloon, which Lichtenstein has relegated to the margin above the plane. In the right panel, the exploding plane—depicted head-on—is outlined by the flames, accompanied by the bold exclamation "WHAAM!". Although separate, with one panel containing the missile launch and the other its explosion, representing two distinct events, the two panels are clearly linked spatially and temporally, not least by linked by the horizontal smoke trail of the missile. Lichtenstein commented on this piece in a July 10, 1967 letter: "I remember being concerned with the idea of doing two almost separate paintings having little hint of compositional connection, and each having slightly separate stylistic character. Of course there is the humorous connection of one panel shooting the other."

File:Whaam! text balloon.jpg

Text balloon of Whaam!

Lichtenstein altered the composition to make the image more compelling, by making the exploding plane more prominent compared to the attacking plane than in the original. The smoke trail of the missile has become a horizontal line. The flames of the explosion dominate the right panel, but the pilot and the airplane in the left panel are the narrative focus. They exemplify Lichtenstein's painstaking detailing of physical features such as the aircraft's cockpit. The other element of the narrative content is a text balloon that contains the following text: "I pressed the fire control ... and ahead of me rockets blazed through the sky ..."

Lichtenstein borrowed both comic book techniques and subjects, mimicking the style while adapting the subject matter. He explained that "Signs and comic strips are interesting as subject matter. There are certain things that are usable, forceful and vital about commercial art." He was attracted to using the cool, formal style to depict emotive subjects, leaving the viewer to interpret the artist's intention. He adopted a simplified color scheme and commercial printing-like techniques. The borrowed technique was "representing tonal variations with patterns of colored circles that imitated the half-tone screens of Ben Day dots used in newspaper printing, and surrounding these with black outlines similar to those used to conceal imperfections in cheap newsprint." PBS asserts that this is an adaptation of the ligne claire style associated with Hergé. Lichtenstein once said of his technique: "I take a cliche and try to organize its forms to make it monumental."

General context

Lichtenstein's works based on enlarged panels from comic books engendered a widespread debate about their merits as art. Lichtenstein himself admitted, "I am nominally copying, but I am really restating the copied thing in other terms. In doing that, the original acquires a totally different texture. It isn't thick or thin brushstrokes, it's dots and flat colours and unyielding lines." Although Lichtenstein's comic-based work is now widely accepted, concerns are still expressed by critics who say Lichtenstein did not credit, pay any royalties to, or seek permission from the original artists or copyright holders. In an interview for a BBC4 documentary in 2013, Alastair Sooke asked the comic book artist Dave Gibbons if he considered Lichtenstein a plagiarist. Gibbons replied: "I would say 'copycat'. In music for instance, you can't just whistle somebody else's tune or perform somebody else's tune, no matter how badly, without somehow crediting and giving payment to the original artist. That's to say, this is 'WHAAM! by Roy Lichtenstein, after Irv Novick'." In an account published in 1998, Irv Novick said that he had met Lichtenstein in the army in 1947 and, as his superior officer, had responded to Lichtenstein's tearful complaints about the menial tasks he was assigned by recommending him for a better job. Jean-Paul Gabilliet has questioned this account, saying that Lichtenstein had left the army a year before the time Novick says the incident took place. Bart Beaty, noting that Lichtenstein had appropriated Novick for works such as Whaam! and Okay Hot-Shot, Okay!, says that Novick's story "seems to be an attempt to personally diminish" the more famous artist.

Reception

Whaam!'s grand scale and dramatic depiction make it a historic work of pop art. With Lichtenstein's other monumental war painting As I Opened Fire, Whaam! is regarded as the culmination of Lichtenstein's dramatic war-comics works. Whaam! is less abstract than As I Opened Fire. It is widely described as either Lichtenstein's most famous work, or, along with Drowning Girl, as one of his two most famous works. It is described, along with Warhol's Marilyn Monroe prints, as one of the most famous works of pop art. Gianni Versace once linked the two iconic pop art images via his gown designs. The work is also regarded as one of his most influential works along with Drowning Girl and Look Mickey.

Positive

José Pierre says Whaam! represented Lichtenstein's 1963 expansion "into the 'epic' vein". A November 1963 Art Magazine review called it one of the "broad and powerful paintings" of the 1963 exhibition at Castelli's Gallery. The Burlington Magazine in 1968 described the explosion as combining "art nouveau elegance with a nervous energy reminiscent of Abstract Expressionism". One view is that by magnifying the comic book panels to an enormous size, "Lichtenstein slapped the viewer in the face with their triviality." Whaam! presented "... limited, flat colors and hard, precise drawing," which produced "... a hard-edge subject painting that documents while it gently parodies the familiar hero images of modern America." The flat and highly finished style of planned brushstrokes are pop art's retort to Expressionism.

Whaam! stands out from Lichtenstein's other comic-based works as the most successful and harmonious composition: the narrative and graphic elements are complementary; the senses of time and space are logical, the action from left to right; and the components are spatially aligned to emphasize the action. The ellipses of the text balloon present a progression which culminates with a "WHAAM!". The "coincidence of pictorial and verbal order" are clear for the Western viewer with the explanatory text beginning in the upper left and action vector moving from the left foreground to the right background, culminating in a graphical explosion in tandem with a narrative exclamation. Wendy Steiner says the striking incongruity of the two panels—the left panel appearing to be "truncated", while the right depicts a centralized explosion—enhances the work's narrative power.

Despite his general distaste for the 2013 Lichtenstein Retrospective at the Tate Modern, Adrian Searle of The Guardian credited the work's title with accurately describing its graphic content: "Whaam! goes the painting, as the rocket hits, and the enemy fighter explodes in a livid, comic-book roar." David McCarthy regarded the work as a "spectacular display of firepower".

The most important element of Lichtenstein's procedure was "the enlargement and unification of his source material". His method entailed "strengthening of the formal aspects of the composition, a stylization of motif, and a 'freezing' of both emotion and actions". Extreme examples of his formalization become "virtual abstraction" when the viewer recalls that the motif is an element of a larger work. Thus, Lichtenstein reinforced the non-realist view of comic strips and advertisements, presenting them as artificial images with minimalistic graphic techniques. Lichtenstein's magnification of his source material stressed the plainness of his motifs as an equivalent to mechanical commercial drawing, leading to implications about his statements on modern industrial America. Nonetheless, Lichtenstein appears to have accepted the American capitalist industrial culture based on his frequent commercial art source material, according to The Grove Encyclopedia of Art.

The comic book medium that inspired paintings such as Whaam! was, in turn, affected by the cultural impact of pop art. By the mid-1960s, some comic books were displaying a new emphasis on garish colors, emphatic sound effects, and stilted dialogue—the elements of comic book style that had come to be regarded as camp—in an attempt to appeal to older, college-age readers who appreciated pop art.

Negative

At the time of the 2013 Lichtenstein Retrospective at the Tate Modern, The Daily Telegraph's critic Alastair Smart wrote a generally disparaging review in which he characterized Whaam! as an attempt to mimic Abstract Expressionism. Smart said the work was neither a positive commentary on the fighting American spirit nor a critique, but was notable for marking "Lichtenstein's incendiary impact on the US art scene".

The Tate Gallery controversially bought the work in 1966, paying art dealer Ileana Sonnabend £4,665 (£109,763 in 2024 currency)—in spite of a reported 1966 market price of £5,382 (£126,633 in 2024 currency). The acquisition was condemned by some of the museum's trustees, among them the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, the painter Andrew Forge, and the critic Herbert Read. The Tate's director, Norman Reid, said that the work aroused more public interest than any acquisition since World War II. The first Lichtenstein retrospective held at the museum in 1967 attracted 52,000 visitors.

Lichtenstein's presentation of aerial combat is regarded as "dispassionate, detached and oddly disembodied" by McCarthy, who notes that Lichtenstein seemed intent upon scaling up a comic book image to history painting dimensions. This was in contrast to artists in whom the experience of the military conflict brought out a need to horrify or shock the audience, or both.

On February 24, 2013, Alastair Sooke produced a documentary about the show for BBC4. Sooke interviewed Dave Gibbons in front of Whaam! at the Tate Modern. When Sooke attempted to get Gibbons to talk about Lichtenstein's improvements to the work, Gibbons disagreed: "This to me looks flat and abstracted, to the point of view that to my eyes it's confusing. Whereas the original has got a three-dimensional quality to it, it's got a spontaneity to it, it's got an excitement to it, and a way of involving the viewer that this one lacks."

See also

• Appropriation (art)

References

• Alloway, Lawrence (1983). Roy Lichtenstein. Abbeville Press. ISBN 0-89659-331-2. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Bader, Graham, ed. (2009). Roy Lichtenstein: October Files. MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-01258-4. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Coplans, John, ed. (1972). Roy Lichtenstein. Praeger Publishers. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Waldman, Diane (1993). Roy Lichtenstein. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, Calif.), Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. ISBN 0-89207-108-7. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

External links

• Lichtenstein Foundation website
• Dave Gibbons' parody
• Tate main web page
• Tate catalog