Roy Lichtenstein’s Chinese landscapes at the Tate

Talking art the other day (The School of Shanghai 1840-1920 in Paris) reminded me that the Tate in London has a Roy Lichtenstein retrospective running till the end of May. I’ve never personally been a fan of pop art and all that American cultural referencing but, apparently, included in the exhibition are several of Lichtenstein’s Chinese landscapes as well as the more familiar pop art stuff. So, if like me you’d normally avoid the fighter planes and Disney kitsch, the landscapes may be worth the entry price…

That Lichtenstein would be interested in Chinese landscapes is not that odd if you think of him as an artist always interested primarily in form and style. By the sixties, when Lichtenstein painted his Chinese landscapes, he’d already been interested in Chinese art for two decades having bought a book on Chinese landscapes in Paris while stationed there as a GI. He was later further exposed to Chinese art as a student at Ohio State University in the late 1940s. Lichtenstein was particularly captivated by the traditional Chinese painting he encountered, in particular from the Song Dynasty (960–1279 AD). But then aren’t we all! But moving from that to painting landscapes yourself is quite a major step….

…of course Lichtenstein’s Chinese landscapes are reinterpretations rather than copies or attempts to paint in exactly the same style. Lichtenstein himself stated:

“I think (the Chinese landscapes) impress people with having somewhat the same kind of mystery (historical) Chinese paintings have, but in my mind it’s a sort of pseudo-contemplative or mechanical subtlety…I’m not seriously doing a kind of Zen-like salute to the beauty of nature. It’s really supposed to look like a printed version.”

Nowadays of course Liechtenstein’s Chinese landscapes are perhaps better known that any individual Song Dynasty painters (at least in the west). The Gagosian Gallery in Hong Kong ran an exhibition of the landscapes recently and some feature in the Tate retrospective in London. I noticed, wandering through one of those “instant fakes”art shops in Hong Kong the other day, among the morass of dreadful big headed laughing peasants and Cultural Revolution posters spiked to show everyone heading to KFC (really, is anyone still buying that stuff??!!) some fake Lichtenstein Chinese landscapes with the tell tale dot printing effect. Some sort of flattery and recognition I suppose.