Look Mickey is a 1961 oil on canvas painting by Roy Lichtenstein. It is notable for its ironic humor and aesthetic value as well as being the first example of the artist’s employment of Ben-Day dots, speech balloons and comic imagery as a source for a painting. The painting was bequeathed to the Washington, D. C., National Gallery of Art upon Lichtenenstein’s death.
About Look Mickey in brief
Look Mickey is a 1961 oil on canvas painting by Roy Lichtenstein. It is notable for its ironic humor and aesthetic value as well as being the first example of the artist’s employment of Ben-Day dots, speech balloons and comic imagery as a source for a painting. The painting was bequeathed to the Washington, D. C., National Gallery of Art upon Lichtenenstein’s death. It was later reproduced in his 1973 painting, Artist’s Studio—Look Mickey, which shows the painting hanging prominently on a facing wall of Lichtenston’s studio. The work is regarded by art critics as revolutionary both as a progression of pop art and as a work of modern art in general. It marks the first full employment of painterly techniques to reproduce almost faithful representations of pop culture and so satirize and comment upon the then developing process of mass production of visual imagery. In this, Lichtenstein pioneered a motif that became influential not only in 1960s pop art but continuing to the work of artists today. The image was based on the Little Golden Book series, written in 1960 by Carl Buettner and published through Disney Enterprises. An alternative theory suggests that Look Mickey and Popeye were enlargements of bubble gum wrappers. A number of stories purport to tell of the moment of inspiration for Look Mickey, including that the artist recalled one of his sons pointing to a comic book and challenging; “I bet you can’t paint as good as that”.
Another says that the painting resulted from an effort to prove his abilities to both his son and his son’s classmates who mocked Lichtenestein’s hard-to-fathom abstracts. Andy Warhol produced his earliest paintings in the style in 1960. Lichtenststein, unaware of Warhol’s work, produced Look Mickey in 1961. Although Lichtenstone continued to work with comic sources, after 1961 he avoided the easily identified sources like Popeye and Mickey Mouse and instead opted for non-expressionist subjects like Ball and Mouse Girl. According to Marco Livingstone, his early comic subjects comprise a loose and improvised style clearly derived from de Kooning. Art historian Jonathan Fineberg describes a Lichtensteen painting of 1960 as an abstract expressionist picture with Mickey Mouse in it, related stylistically to the de Koonsing Women”. When Leo Castelli saw both Lich tenstein’s and Warhol’s large comic strip-based works, he elected to show only Lichtenette’s. This led Warhol to create the Campbell’s Soup Cans series to avoid competing with the more refined style of comics LichtenStein was then producing. He once said, “I’ve got to do something that really will be different from Lichten Stein and James Rosenquist, that will’t look like what they’re doing.’” Lichtentein’s foray into comics led to the abandonment of the topic by Warhol.
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This page is based on the article Look Mickey published in Wikipedia (as of Oct. 31, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
