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Look Mickey
ArtistRoy Lichtenstein
Year1961
TypePop art
LocationNational Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Look Mickey (sometimes Look Mickey!) is a 1961 painting by Roy Lichtenstein. It was bequeathed to the National Gallery of Art upon the death of the artist and remains in its collection. It is widely regarded as Lichtenstein's transformation point from Abstract expressionism to Pop Art with his initial foray into Ben-Day dots, his first use of comic imagery and his first use of speech balloons.

The painting, containing Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck in a fishing mishap, is regarded by critics as revolutionary and as Liechtenstein's first example of employing painterly techniques to depict mechanical reproduction.

The work was derived from an illustrated story book about Donald Duck, but Lichtenstein made transformations from the original source. He added color and altered the perspective, while seeming to be making statements about himself. The work was from Lichtenstein's first solo exhibition and was later included, in large part, in another of his works.

Background

The source for this image was Donald Duck Lost and Found, 1960, Disney Enterprises, Carl Buettner, (illustration by Bob Grant and Bob Totten)[1]

In 1958, Lichtenstein made drawings of several comic strip characters. In 1960, Andy Warhol produced his earliest comic-strip paintings. Lichtenstein, without knowing of Warhol, produced Look Mickey and Popeye in 1961 as enlargements of bubble gum wrappers according to some sources.[2] According to the Lichtenstein Foundation website, the summer 1961 painting was based on the Little Golden Book series.[3] The National Gallery of Art notes that the source is entitled Donald Duck Lost and Found.[4][1] The source for this image was Donald Duck Lost and Found, 1960, Disney Enterprises, Carl Buettner, (illustration by Bob Grant and Bob Totten).[1]

One source says that a defining moment, came when one of his sons pointed to a comic book and said "I bet you can't paint as good as that", resulting in this image.[5] Another says that the painting resulted from an effort to prove to both his son and his classmates who mocked Roy's painting of hard to fathom abstracts.[6] Allan Kaprow relayed a story that he once stated in reference to a Bazooka Double Bubble Gum wrapper to Lichtenstein, "You can't teach color from Cézanne, you can only teach it from something like this." Lichtenstein then showed him one of his Donald Duck images.[7]

Lichtenstein uses minor color modifications.[8] His early comic subjects are said to be a "loose and improvised style clearly derived from de Kooning,"[2] in his Women.[9] When Leo Castelli saw both Lichtenstein's and Warhol's large comic strip-based works, he elected to show only Lichtenstein's, causing Warhol to turn to create the Campbell's Soup Cans series.[10] Thus, Lichtenstein's foray into comics led to the abandonment of the topic by Warhol.[11] Although Lichtenstein would work from comics, after 1961 he abandoned the easily identified ones like Popeye and Mickey Mouse.[12]

Description

"It occurred to me one day to do something that would appear to be just the same as a comic book illustration without employing the then current symbols of art: the thick and thin paint, the calligraphic line and all that had become the hallmark of painting in the 1940s and '50s. I would make marks that would remind one of a real comic strip."

—Lichtenstein on the germination of his style[13]

Look Mickey represented his first non-Expressionism work. It also marked his initial foray into Ben-Day dots used to give an "industrial" half-tone effect and his first speech balloon.[3] It is also his first use of comics as subject matter.[14] The work has visible pencil marks and is known for his use of a plastic-bristle dog brush to apply the oil painting onto the canvas.[3] Lichtenstein's rendering of the mass-produced illustration simplified the composition down to primary colors, giving it even more of a "pop" feel than the original.[4]

Look Mickey has reflexive elements that call upon Caravaggio's Narcissus.[15]

Lichtenstein made several transformative changes to the original work: He eliminated several non-essential figures and rotated the dock so that instead of looking off the end of the dock, Donald is looking off the side of the dock, although Donald and Mickey are positioned within the picture in almost the precise original location.[16] He not only redesigned the space, but also redesigned Donald's body and rod for better balance and eliminated signs of stress and exertion to form a meticulous composition.[17]

That autumn, a fellow teacher at Rutgers University named Allan Kaprow, made introductions between Lichtenstein and Leo Castelli Gallery director Ivan Karp. Lichtenstein showed Karp several paintings, but not Look Mickey. He instead impressed him with Girl with Ball which convinced Karp to represent Lichtenstein weeks later.[3]

In the painting, Donald Duck's large eyes indicate belief that he did catch something big, while Mickey Mouse's small eyes indicate the opposite.[18] This is also a prominent example of Lichtenstein's theme relating to vision. He uses the narrative to emphasize this theme, while presenting several visual elements relating to the theme.[19] Walt Disney once said the following about Donald Duck as a subject: "Look at Donald Duck. He's got a big mouth, a big belligerent eye, a twistable neck and a substantial backside that's highly flexible. The duck comes near being the animator's ideal subject. He's got plasticity plus."[20] Lichtenstein's painting was based on these elements.[21]

Legacy

When Lichtenstein had his first solo show at The Leo Castelli Gallery in February 1962, it sold out before opening.[22] This was one of the paintings that was shown in Lichtenstein's first show.[5] Later Lichtenstein refers to this painting in Artist's Studio—Look Mickey, which depicts his own studio as the ideal studio and implies that the public consensus ratifies his choice of popular culture subject matter.[23] Lichtenstein reflected on this work many years later:

The idea of doing [a cartoon painting] without appaarent alteration just occurred to me...and I did one really almost half seriously to get an idea of what it might look like. And as I was painting this painting I kind of got interested in organizing it as a painting and brought it to some kind of conclusion as an aesthetic statement, which I hadn't really intended to do to begin with. And then I really went back to my other kind of painting, which was pretty abstract. Or tried to. But I had this cartoon painting in my studio, and it was a little too formidable. I coudn't keep my eyes off it, and it sort of prevented me from painting in any other way, and then I decided this stuff was really serious...I would say I had it on my easel for a week. I would just want to see what it looked like. I tried to make it a work of art. I wasn't trying just to copy. I realized that this was just so much more compelling.

— Eric Shanes, [24]

The painting was bequeathed to the National Gallery of Art following Lichtenstein's 1997 death as a result of a promise made in 1990 in honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art.[25][4]

Reception

The revolutionary change in style to now reproduce single comic strip frames in extremely large proportions was regarded as radical.[26] "Look Mickey is broad comedy and falls into the category of slapstick..." according to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum's Diane Waldman.[27] Lichtenstein made this work more significant by his slight alterations in terms of "linear clarity and colour" and by making it an aesthetic work as a result of his choice of scale.[24] Lichtenstein disguised a meticulous painting as a virtual reproduction of industrial production of pop culture.[17] According to Graham Bader, "Lichtenstein's painting in fact appears more the product of industrial manufacture than the very pulp image on which it is based."[28] The work is also considered reflexive, in the sense that the artist is painting something through which the viewer may see elements of the artist.[15]

Notes

  1. ^ a b c Bader, Graham. "Donald's Numbness". In Bader (ed.). p. 175. {{cite book}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  2. ^ a b Livingstone. pp. 72–73. In 1956 Lichtenstein had produced a small lithograph, Ten Dollar Bill, in a jovial, cartoon-like style, and in 1958, partly to entertain his two sons (then aged two and four), he had made ink drawings of comic-strip characters such as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Bugs Bunny in a loose and improvised style clearly derived from de Kooning. Yet in spite of these precedents in his own work, the change in both method and sensibility implicit in the 1961 paintings Popeye and Look Mickey, both of which were gross enlargements of images printed on bubble-gum wrappers, was so striking as to announce his new Pop style at a single stroke. {{cite book}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  3. ^ a b c d "Chronology". Roy Lichtenstein Foundation. Retrieved 2012-05-09.
  4. ^ a b c "The Collection: National Gallery of Art". National Gallery of Art. Retrieved 2012-05-09.
  5. ^ a b Marquis, Alice Goldfarb (2010). "The Arts Take Center Stage". The Pop! Revolution. MFA Publications. p. 37. ISBN 978-0-87846-744-0.
  6. ^ Bader, Graham. "Donald's Numbness". In Bader (ed.). p. 166. ...Lichtenstein claimed that he decided to paint his duck-and-mouse scene as a favor to his youngest son Mitchell, who had been embarrassed at school by the incomprehensibility of his father's occupation as a (then) abstract artist. Such a comic book image, so the tale goes, would prove to both Mitchell and his elementary school classmates that the elder Lichtenstein was a skilled craftsman, not, as his son's friends had claimed, 'somebody who paints abstracts because he's no good at drawing.' {{cite book}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  7. ^ Waldman, Diane (1993). "Early Pop Pictures". Roy Lichtenstein. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. p. 21. ISBN 0-89207-108-7. Lichtenstein has a vivid recollection that he based the image on a panel of a comic strip from a a bubble-gum wrapper, but efforts to locate the original source have so far been unsuccessful. Kaprow remembers that once, in a discussion with Lichtenstein, he pointed to a Bazooka Double Bubble Gum wrapper and remarked, 'You can't teach color from Cézanne, you can only teach it from something like this.' Lichtenstein then showed him the painting he had done with the image of Donald Duck in it. Kaprow...realized that Lichtenstein 'had confirmed what I'd just been saying.' Lichtenstein destroyed those earlies paintings featuring cartoon images, and shortly thereafter he painted Look Mickey.
  8. ^ Coplans, John, ed. (1972). Roy Lichtenstein. Praeger Publishers. p. 34. Approximately six paintings of recognizable characters from comic-strip frames (Popeye, Wimpy, Bugs Bunny, Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, and so on) directly and loosely drawn on the canvas and painted with conventional artists' materials (oil on canvas) with minor changes in color and form from the original cartoon...
  9. ^ Fineberg. "The Landscape of Signs: American Pop Art 1960 to 1965". p. 260. During 1960 Lichtenstein painted an abstract expressionist picture with Mickey Mouse in it, related stylistically to the de Kooning "Women." {{cite book}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  10. ^ Livingstone, Marco, ed. (1991). Pop Art: An International Perspective. Rizzoli International Publications, Inc. p. 32. ISBN 0-8478-1475-0. It is indeed true that Warhol, in 1960, and Lichtenstein, in 1961, made large works derived from comic strip sources, each without knowledge of the other (cat. 236, 147). Ivan Karp saw Lichtenstein's work first and recommended him to Castelli. When he also put forward Warhol, Castelli decided the gallery could not exhibit both artists because of the similarity he perceived in their paintings. In dismay Warhol turned from cartoons and created the series of Campbell's Soup Cans shown in his first one-man Pop Art exhibition, which was presented by Irving Blum at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, but not until July 1962.
  11. ^ Fineberg. "The Landscape of Signs: American Pop Art 1960 to 1965". p. 251. Nevertheless he abandoned the comics as a subject from the moment he saw Lichtenstein's paintings of comics at the Castelli Gallery in 1961, demonstrating a keen instinct for constructing and marketing an original style. {{cite book}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  12. ^ Fineberg. "The Landscape of Signs: American Pop Art 1960 to 1965". p. 261. After 1961 he abandoned the easily identifiable cartoon charactrs like Popeye and Mickey Mouse in favor of anonymous strips, most often with soap opera romance or action themes. {{cite book}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  13. ^ Lichtenstein, Roy. "A Review of My Work Since 1961—A Slide Presentation". In Bader (ed.). p. 57. {{cite book}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  14. ^ Alloway. p. 13. That was the year Lichtenstein made his first paintings based on comic imagery, using characters like Popeye and , in Look Mickey, Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse. {{cite book}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  15. ^ a b Bader, Graham. "Donald's Numbness". In Bader (ed.). p. 176–78. Look Mickey is not just (or even) an image of an image. It is, rather an image about image-making, and, specifically, about Lichtenstein's own medium of painting. What it ultimately presents us, I want to argue, is a self portrait...Look Mickey explicitly situates the painting's maker himself within the self-enclosed narcissitic circuit at its center. For while Lichtenstein simplifies Donald's reflected visage to a subtly stylized and barely noticeable ripple on the water below, he also places his own signature—a simple blue 'rfl'—squarely in the duck's field of vision. And even beyond his plight's parallels to that of poor Narcissus and his unfocused gaze at the initials in the water before him, Donald is figured here as a kind of surrogate for the image's creator. {{cite book}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  16. ^ Bader, Graham. "Donald's Numbness". In Bader (ed.). p. 174. In fact, Look Mickey evidences more 'transformation' than nearly all of the artist's early-'60s comic paintings for which source images are known. As recently discovered children's book illustration on which Lichtenstein based his 1961 painting reveals, he not only removed extraneous figures and radically flattened the pictorial space of his model, but rotated the dock on which its central action transpires by ninety degrees, directing this away from, rather than toward, his beholders (while positioning Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, despite this new axis almost precisely as in the original image). {{cite book}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  17. ^ a b Bader, Graham. "Donald's Numbness". In Bader (ed.). pp. 174–75. There is no denying that he created a more unified image through these changes, one even Sherman could praise: we see this in his reconfiguring of the diffuse space of the original picture into streamlined bands of blue and yellow; his rotating of the dock's planks to guide, rather than cross against, its extension into the water; his redesign of Donald's body and taut rod into a perfectly balanced egg-like ellipse; his eradication of such particulars as wrinkles or marks of exertion; his shifting of Mickey's fishing pole to continue the vertical extension of the pylon beneath it;l or, finally—for such a list could surely continue—his careful rhyming of this same pole's excess wire with the outline of Donald's rear immediately to its left. Look Mickey, in short, is a meticulously composed image—even as it wears the guise of its opposite, posing as a simple-minded mimicry of industrial mass culture. {{cite book}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  18. ^ Hendrickson, Janis (1993). "The Beginnings". Roy Lichtenstein. Benedikt Taschen. p. 20. ISBN 3-8228-9633-0. It shows the emotional Donald Duck hooking his own coattail and getting excited about a big fish that will doubtless be the one that got away. Mickey, as always finer and smarter than Donald, is restraining his laughter with a gloved paw...Donald's big expressive eyes are starting out of his head as if he really does see a fish, while the cooler Mickey, whose eyes are small and empty, knows better.
  19. ^ Lobel, Michael (2003). "Pop according To Lichtenstein". In Holm, Michael Juul, Poul Erik Tøjner and Martin Caiger-Smith (ed.). Roy Lichtenstein: All About Art. Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. p. 85. ISBN 87-90029-85-2. Consider the consistency with which Lichtenstein was concerned in his work with issues of vision, it should come as no surprise that acts of seeing and looking are frequently foregrounded in his paintings. This is true even from the very beginning of his experimentation with the Pop idiom, in such canvases as Look Mickey and I Can See The Whole Room...And There's Nobody In It!, both from 1961. The titles of these works with their references to looking and seeing – already signal the artist's concerns with acts of vision, and the scenes depicted in these paintings bear this out. Look Mickey describes a veritable circuit of looks: Donald Duck gazes into the water below while Mickey Mouse looks at him from behind, covering his mouth in a gesture that signifies a stifled laugh.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link)
  20. ^ Bader, Graham. "Donald's Numbness". In Bader (ed.). p. 189. {{cite book}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  21. ^ Bader, Graham. "Donald's Numbness". In Bader (ed.). p. 190. Lichtenstein's painting, we can notice, is built around just these elements—Donald's mouth, eyes, and "substantial backside"—and focuses on precisely the exemplary plasticity of Disney's character. {{cite book}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  22. ^ Tomkins, Calvin (1988). "Roy Lichtenstein: Mural With Blue Brushstroke". Harry N. Abrams, Inc. p. 25. ISBN 0-8109-2356-4. His first show at Castelli's, in February 1962, was sold out before the opening. Prices were ridiculous by current standards—$1,000 for Blam, $1,200 for Engagement Ring, $800 for The Refrigerator. The purchasers were Richard Brown Baker, Giuseppe Panza, Robert Scull— people who had helped to make the market for Abstract Expressionism and who were becoming in the 1960s a major factor in contemporary art... {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |url= (help)
  23. ^ Alloway. p. 87. ...Artist's Studio, Look Mickey (1973), refers to a painting of Lichtenstein's own, one of the earliest in the comics style. Repeating Look Mickey in the context of an ideal studio makes a point: Lichtenstein is saying that public taste has validated his use of popular culture as a direct source of imagery. {{cite book}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  24. ^ a b Shanes, Eric (2009). "The Plates". Pop Art. Parkstone Press International. p. 84. ISBN 978-1-84484-619-1. ...Lichtenstein made subtle alterations to the image that greatly increased its pictorial impact, especially where linear clarity and colour are concerned. Of course by vastly expanding the original he also moved an insignificant image onto another aesthetic plane altogether.
  25. ^ Vogel, Carol (1998-01-16). "Inside Art". The New York Times. Retrieved 2012-05-09.
  26. ^ Livingstone. p. 73. This radical break with his previous work, made when he was in his late thirties, owed something to the subject-matter opened up by Happenings and even more to the formal solutions proposed by Johns's object paintings. The idea proposed by lichtenstein was of disarming, even reckless, simplicity: to enlarge a single comic-strip image to huge proportions, making no apparent chages to the composition, drawing style or coloour, and to convey it by means of a depersonalized technique of flat colour encased in black outlines that was derived directly from its pringted source. {{cite book}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  27. ^ Waldman, Diane (1993). "Comic Strips and Advertising Images". Roy Lichtenstein. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. p. 59. ISBN 0-89207-108-7.
  28. ^ Bader, Graham. "Donald's Numbness". In Bader (ed.). p. 176. {{cite book}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)

References

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