My direction is very anti-contemplative. If you thought I was for commercial products, you’d think there was no irony. The irony isn’t meant to be an ironic comment on our society, exactly.
ROY LICHTENSTEINI think art since Cezanne has become extremely romantic and unrealistic, feeding on art. It is Utopian. It has less and less to do with the world. It looks inward – neo-Zen and all that. Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn’t look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.
More Roy Lichtenstein Quotes
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But usually I begin things through a drawing, so a lot of things are worked out in the drawing. But even then, I still allow for and want to make changes.
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You know, as you compose music, you’re just off in your own world.
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I was at Rutgers University, and that was a center for Fluxus in a way. But it wasn’t what I was interested in.
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Everybody knows that abstract art can be art, and most people know that they may not like it, even if they understand there’s another purpose to it.
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Im not really sure what social message my art carries, if any.
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I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me.
ROY LICHTENSTEIN -
Usually I begin things through a drawing, so a lot of things are worked out in the drawing. But even then, I still allow for and want to make changes.
ROY LICHTENSTEIN -
We like to think of industrialization as being despicable.
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All of it had an impact – as did happenings – because I could see that art was changing from expressionism, which I was doing at the time, or thought I was doing. But it wasn’t the direction I really wanted to go.
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A number of artists have done things with Mickey Mouse – including Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol. He’s such an American symbol, and such an anti-art symbol.
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Picasso’s always been such a huge influence that I thought when I started the cartoon paintings that I was getting away from Picasso, and even my cartoons of Picasso were done almost to rid myself of his influence.
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Outside is the world; it’s there. Pop Art looks out into the world.
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And I dont really want it to carry one. Im not interested in the subject matter to try to teach society anything, or to try to better our world in any way.
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I think its the tension between what seems to be so rigid and cliched and the fact that art really cant be this way.
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But when I worked on a painting I would do it from a drawing but I would put certain things I was fairly sure I wanted in the painting, and then collage on the painting with printed dots or painted paper or something before I really committed it.
ROY LICHTENSTEIN






