Pompidou Center : Roy Lichtenstein exhibition
From 3rd July to 04th November 2013
(from 11 am to 9pm, until 11 pm every thursdays)
Today Roy Lichtenstein is regarded as one of the stars of the pop art movement as well as a great master of American painting. And yet, having been at the avant-garde of pop art for several years, Lichtenstein went much further. As soon as he began to reference artists and styles from art history in his works, he was very quickly perceived as a postmodern artist. Then, in the last years of his life, returning to the classic genres of the nude and the landscape, he became almost a traditional painter. So that Roy Lichtenstein is, today, a “classic” artist. Yet the power of his art is also an amused distance, critical without becoming cynical, that he applied to both himself and to art, from early on to the end of his life, the importance of which must be recognised. In one of his last interviews, Lichtenstein did not deny the interviewer’s first question: “Are you sure that you have never created a work completely devoid of all trace of malice, humour or irony?”