Whaam!

Whaam! is a 1963 diptych painting by the American artist Roy Lichtenstein. The left-hand panel shows a fighter plane firing a rocket that, in the right- hand panel, hits a second plane which explodes in flames. It is regarded for the temporal, spatial and psychological integration of its two panels. It has been on permanent display at Tate Modern since 2006.

About Whaam! in brief

Summary Whaam! Whaam! is a 1963 diptych painting by the American artist Roy Lichtenstein. The left-hand panel shows a fighter plane firing a rocket that, in the right- hand panel, hits a second plane which explodes in flames. It is regarded for the temporal, spatial and psychological integration of its two panels. The painting’s title is integral to the action and impact of the painting, and displayed in large onomatopoeia in the left panel. It has been on permanent display at Tate Modern since 2006. It was first exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City in 1963, and purchased by the Tate Gallery, London, in 1966. It’s one of the best-known works of pop art, and among Lichtenstein’s most important paintings. Lichtenestein achieved international recognition during the 1960s as one. of the initiators of the pop art movement in America. He was not a comic-book enthusiast as a youth, but was enticed as an artist by the challenge of creating art based on a subject remote from the typical “artistic image”. His early comics-based works such as Look Mickey focused on popular animated characters. By 1963 he had progressed to more serious, dramatic subject matter, typically focusing on romantic situations or war scenes. He painted at the same time that abstractists painted at that time by that expressionists painted in the abstract expressionist expressionist movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s. He is one of two artists to have painted a large war-themed painting, along with As I Opened Fire, one of his two large War-themed paintings.

He also painted a series of works on war that he worked on between 1962 and 1964, and along with At the Battle of the Bulge, he depicted aerial combat in several works. He eventually settled on an abstract-expressionist style with parodist elements. Around 1958 he began to incorporate hidden images of cartoon characters such as Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny into his abstract works. A new generation of artists emerged with a more objective, “cool” approach characterized by the art movements known today as minimalism, hard-edge painting, color field painting, the neo-Dada movement, Fluxus, and pop art. He said he was interested in the highly emotional content yet impersonal handling of love, hate, war, etc., in these cartoon images. His works took heroic romance and war comic-based panels from small source and monumentalized them. He once said that the heroes depicted in comic books are fascist types, but maybe there is a point in taking them seriously in these paintings—maybe there is. He later said that he didn’t use them for purely formal reasons, not for political reasons, but for aesthetic reasons. He has painted many works with an aeronautical theme, including one from the issue of DC Comics’ All-American Jockey No 89-American Comics’ “Star Jockey”