Floor 4: Roy Lichtenstein & Sigmar Polke (exiting Guston)
Overview
Gallery Wayfinding
You are in the Roy Lichtenstein & Sigmar Polke Gallery. The gallery balances Lichenstein's use of vibrant, primary colors with Polke's somewhat softer, warmer-toned pieces.
You've entered from the back left corner of this long rectangular gallery, facing the short, far front wall. The first half of the gallery has five paintings by Lichtenstein and an artist panel with a video about Lichtenstein. To access the audio, use the handheld listening device attached to the panel. The second half of the gallery contains five 2-D artworks by Polke and an artist panel with information about the artist. There is a bench in this second half of the gallery.
The exit to the Gerhard Richter Gallery is in the front right corner of the gallery. The QR code is at the beginning of the right wall, marked with a perpendicular tactile floor strip.
Label
"I take a cliché and try to organize its forms to make it monumental. The difference is often not great, but it is crucial."
—Roy Lichtenstein, 1964
Roy Lichtenstein
Born 1923, New York; died 1997, New York
Roy Lichtenstein first achieved fame and notoriety in the early 1960s with paintings based on comic books and newspaper advertisements. Critics objected not only to his pop-culture subjects, but also to his technique: His canvases seemed as anonymous and machinelike as their commercially printed sources. But a closer look reveals that Lichtenstein meticulously hand-painted everything. Much of his work takes art itself as its subject, imitating or referencing modern artists and art movements. By challenging notions of originality and authenticity, Lichtenstein helped lay the groundwork for later artists working with appropriation, and anticipated aspects of today's digital culture.
Related Media
Transcript
Roy Lichtenstein:
It's strange how what you think is basic in art is really, to a certain extent, taste. And it's hard to break that. And everything about the quality of drawing, color—everything—was counter to what I had both been taught and actually appreciated. Except I knew it had meaning, and I knew very shortly that it had more meaning than the things I had done before. But because it was so different, it was really frightening.
I don't know if there's eroticism in my work. I would think it's perfectly clean, but it becomes so mechanical in its representation that it has no humanity. Even though the girls are crying and, you know, it's a picture of a lamb chop or something like that, there are no vital juices involved. It's only a draftsman rendering of the subject. My work sanitizes it, but it's also, I suppose, symbolic of commercial art sanitizing human feelings. I think it has to be read that way, even though I don't know whether that's purposeful on my part.
My first reaction that I remember to comic books would be taking them for real, and maybe it's a mixture of the possibility that one can take these sanitized symbols and project emotions into them. The stories are certainly meant to be highly emotional. It isn't the emotion of the subject that I'm really trying to get across at all. I'm trying, maybe, to disguise the real purpose of painting by having subject matter seem to be so important in the work.
I don't think there's any reason why you have to have subject matter as a general principle. There's nothing I really believe in. There is only that I'm interested in doing certain things with it. Almost all the way through history, up to very modern times, people thought they needed subject matter. As art got more and more abstract, it became obvious that you could generate the forms yourself and really didn't make any of it. What was used along with this is somewhat consistent, and it had to have meanings beyond that. But you certainly didn't have to start with a preconceived idea. You could smear some paint and start working, and I feel I could do that. I prefer to work from some source, though, in that most of the work I've done has been from some other art or thing. Sometimes the things I do are not really from pictures, even though they always seem to be.
Objects
10 objects in the order you'll encounter them from this entrance. Select an object to view details.
Artwork Label Text
1962
Oil on canvas
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1998
Lichtenstein turned to war-themed comic books for a number of paintings in the early 1960s, when US involvement in Vietnam was intensifying. He was interested in how the comics represented such highly charged subjects through "standard, obvious and removed techniques." Paintings such as Live Ammo (Tzing!) are even further distanced from their original subject than the comic-book panels that inspired them. We can see how Lichtenstein translated the whiskered, grimacing figure of the original into a clean-shaven hero with a cleft chin and replaced the original crosshatching with uniformly smooth planes of color.
Visual Description
A large, oil-on-canvas painting—about as tall as an average adult, and slightly narrower than their outstretched arms—presents a comic-book-style close-up of a soldier aiming a gun. The piece is rendered in fields of color and thick black outlines.
The soldier's face fills the center. It is colored a bright, saturated yellow with sharp black contour lines defining his eyes, nose, and partially open mouth. A netted helmet sits low on his forehead. The net pattern is drawn as a black grid over yellow, and half of an unbuckled chin strap hangs down from the side of the helmet and seems to be flying away from the soldier's face. Dense black shadows appear on the left side of his head, underneath his helmet, as well as under his chin. From the bottom center toward our right, the soldier grips and aims a rifle or machine gun; the hand is simplified into outlined yellow forms, and the gun’s barrel and ribbed section extend horizontally toward the edge of the painting on our right
On our left, comic sound-effect text appears in the upper left corner: the word "tzing!" appears in capital letters that are red and blocky; below that, "bweee!" appears in loose, black, capital letters that are slightly wavy and hand-drawn. Both words are set within a sharp, gray, diagonal burst shape.
A thin black border frames the composition and the piece is set within a white wood frame.
Artwork Label Text
1996
Painted and patinated bronze
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 2001
Visual Description
A slender painted bronze sculpture—about the height of a standard door, but much narrower—presents a stylized, comic-book-style representation of a yellow fedora hat flying up into the air.
The sculpture is flat and planar, with thin, two-inch sides. The front and back faces are framed by thick black outlines that are slightly raised from the areas of bold color that they surround. The sculpture rises from a flat, rectangular black base in a sweeping curve. Near the bottom, a rounded white cloud shape grips the base. The vertical curve itself is predominantly yellow with two other adjacent stripes of blue and white that run up the length from the base to the midsection. At about mid-height the curve is interrupted by a jagged, spiky burst of red and white—seemingly a small, comic-style explosion or sign of impact. The yellow vertical curved strip continues upward, narrowing slightly before ending in the fedora-style yellow hat, which is turned on its side.
The work is presented here in the corner of the gallery, so only the front plane is visible, but its thin profile is apparent.
Artwork Label Text
1978
Magna and oil on canvas
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1999
The isolated lips, eye, and tress of blond hair on the right—a motif also visible in Nerts (on view at the beginning of this floor)—recall the fragmented depictions of women in Pablo Picasso's Surrealist paintings. They are joined by an abstracted body that resembles the melting forms of Salvador Dalí. Yet Figures with Sunset is unmistakably a Lichtenstein, rendered in his recognizable comic-inspired style and integrating numerous quotations from his own earlier paintings. Lichtenstein thus reminds us that modern art emerges from and circulates within the same visual universe as popular imagery.
Visual Description
Spanning about nine feet tall by fourteen feet wide—about the size of a small movie theater screen—this magna-and-oil on canvas presents a panoramic scene of abstract human figures and a setting sun built from thick black contours, flat primary colors, and halftone dot patterns.
The composition is divided into a series of interlocking zones. On our left, a tall vertical section of black-and-white woodgrain lines rises up, topped by a rounded white cloud shape outlined in black. Beneath the cloud sit angular, blocky structures in gray, olive green, black, and deep blue, their faces shaded with diagonal hatch marks. Moving across to our right, a pale sky meets a dark, saturated blue band. Above this band floats a small, half-sun with yellow rays around a red semicircle, all set above a half yellow and half black inverted triangle. Cutting upward through the center is a slender black line supporting sharp triangular flags and angled forms in yellow, white, navy blue, and forest green.
On our right, a man with light skin, neatly combed dark hair, and black brows faces forward, but with his gaze toward the small half sun. He wears a pale peach shirt with a white collar, a red tie, and a white jacket, and is rendered with clean outlines and minimal shading. In front of him and across the lower right stretches an abstract, reclining figure drawn with smooth, continuous black lines. The body is partially shrouded and punctuated with peachy highlights and dense red halftone dots that pool in large areas.
Near the center-right, a prominent oval shape—white with blue halftone dots along its left half— depicts the reflective surface of a mirror. Above and around these figures, additional graphic elements appear: three red halftone circles with prominent center points float near the top center, adjacent to an eye outlined in black; at the far right, a bold, yellow, vertically arched panel frames curving, ribbon-like yellow shapes resembling hair and red pursed lips. Fields of diagonal hatching, woodgrain stripes, and solid color blocks alternate throughout the composition.
Artwork Label Text
2003
Oil and resin on fabric
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 2003
Just as Polke explored the structure of dot-screen (halftone) printing in works such as Springbrunnen (on view nearby), here he mimics the woodblock print—a technology that is far older but similarly associated with the world of popular entertainment. The image reproduced here came from a showbill for an 1802 phantasmagoria act in London. In these productions, illusions of ghosts and other frightening apparitions were created by projecting images onto glass. By painting this found image on a translucent surface that reveals the stretcher bars underneath, Polke highlights the illusionism—and sometimes outright mysticism—of painting.
Visual Description
Spanning about ten feet tall by thirteen feet wide—about the size of a small movie theater screen—this large, oil-and-resin-on-fabric artwork presents two figures engaged in a seance-like ritual inside a sepia-and-amber interior rendered in crisp black linework and pale washes.
To our left, there is a heavy curtain with fringed edges and a dangling tassel, which is rendered in opaque white with black outlines and dense crosshatching. The curtain is pulled back, as though to reveal the scene of the rest of the composition: a room with paneled walls and sharp, receding perspective lines. To our right stands a robed, elderly-looking male figure rendered in thick, dark lines. He has a very long, full beard, thick eyebrows, and a rounded, fur-like cap. His clothing is heavily patterned with vertical and crosshatched marks. The robe falls to the floor and pools slightly at his feet. His right arm stretches diagonally upward and leftward, holding a thin wand or rod aimed toward the center-left of the composition. His left arm extends outward and down, holding a small censer or incense burner by a chain; stylized gray-blue curls of smoke billow from it in looping spirals.
To the left of this man, between him and the curtain, stands a translucent, ghostlike figure in very light bluish lines with a hooded cloak, raised arms, and open hands. The figure's body is faint and partially blends into the warm background. A circular rug or boundary outline on the floor is indicated by two concentric rings; it also encircles them. Between them and inside this space sits a small round tray holding two tall, lit candles with visible flames, a small skull, and a rectangular book. The candles and one side of the skull have white outlines. A small pitcher rests on the floor just outside the tray, slightly right of center. Each of the rectangular panels on the wall behind the figures is filled with a single color—black, red green, and brown—in a pale wash.
The whole surface of the painting, with the exception of the opaque painted curtain, is yellow and translucent. Visible beneath the resin-infused surface, and behind the details of the painting itself, are the painting’s wood stretcher bars. There is one horizontal piece of the wood frame that stretches across the center of the painting, and two vertical pieces that intersect this horizontal piece at the center.
A low museum stanchion has been placed on the floor around this piece.
Artwork Label Text
1966
Paint on linen
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1989
Springbrunnen, while hard to make out, depicts a garden fountain in front of a nondescript house, with a seated figure in the foreground. It belongs to Polke's series of Rasterbilder (halftone pictures), in which he drew from found images that had been printed using the dot-screen process typical of magazine and newspaper image reproduction. Polke began this series in 1963, shortly after Roy Lichtenstein introduced benday dots to his paintings (see nearby). Whereas Lichtenstein re-created the clean, uniform dot patterns of commercial printing, Polke varied the density and color of his dots, deliberately complicating and distorting the images.
Visual Description
A vertically oriented, paint-on-linen work about the size of an average wall poster uses a field of colored dots to build a grainy view of a garden fountain, as well as the exterior of a house, with a seated human figure in the foreground.
To our left, on the left half of the painting, the figure is seen cropped and in partial profile emerging from dotted half tones. A triangular highlight defines the top of the figure's head. The figure appears to be wearing a cap or hat with a low brim over their forehead. Also depicted is a dark eye socket and nose bridge. A shadowy jawline and neck descend into near-black. Above the figure, there is the facade of a small house with what appear to be wide, horizontal windows and a gabled roof with a chimney.
The figure, seated in what appears to be a lawn chair, faces right toward a large fountain that dominates the right half of the composition and occupies the middle-ground. The tiered fountain is topped by a narrow vertical white column of vertically spraying water and flows into a small circular pool.
To our right, across the right and lower areas, the fountain is mottled with sparse yellow-green patches and darker speckling where the dot pattern thickens. Behind the figure and the fountain are dark green patches that suggest trees.
The palette is dominated by black dots over creamy whites and warm yellows, with saturated dark green areas. Small bursts of red and orange near the top right edge suggest a warm-toned sunrise or sunset.
The painting is in a thin, black wood frame.
Artwork Label Text
1983
Acrylic paint on paper
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1990
Visual Description
An acrylic-on-paper work about the size of an average wall poster combines splattered abstraction with a bold, black line drawing to depict a scene with a tall, central, cartoon-like woman.
The woman, drawn in thick black outlines, strides diagonally across the lower half of the composition with long, pale legs and pointed shoes. Her upper body has prominent breasts and a cinched waist. Her face has exaggerated red lips, a small nose, and closed eyes with thick, black lashes. A closed book rests on top of her head and her hair, coiffed and voluminous, falls just above her shoulders.
Behind and around the woman, the background is a field of marks. A dominant wash of warm yellow occupies much of the upper half and is punctuated by scattered purple blotches, black smears, and drips. Teal and green areas pool in the lower left, forming a shadowy mass where a dark, crouched, or seated shape with a face emerges in black and white. Near the lower center-left, a pale, round, head-like form appears amid layered strokes.
Along the bottom, quick white wavy lines suggest water, and a small, simplified pale-blue running figure moves leftward beneath the woman’s striding legs. To the right of the woman there is a large, floating, cylinder-like vase containing several thin, vertical black lines that resemble reeds, with splatters and gestural marks clustering around them. The lower right corner shows angular, blocky blue shapes resembling letterforms or signage fragments laid over a red-and-gray grid of strokes. The piece is set within a light brown wood frame.
Artwork Label Text
1968
Watercolor on paper
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1991
Visual Description
A small watercolor on paper—about the size of a standard piece of paper—presents an abstract composition in soft blues, warm oranges, and vivid reds organized around a silhouette of a bird in the center.
Near the center-right rises a dark, blue-gray form resembling a heron. It has a rounded body tapering to two thin legs, a long neck, and a small head angled upward. A thick red ribbon curves down from the upper right, brushing the bird’s neck area and continuing as a vertical, slightly wavy red line near the lower center. Across the lower third, broad orange and ochre strokes spread horizontally like rippling reflections on water, interspersed with pale blue ovals and short marks.
The background is washed in light blue-gray with scattered darker blue dabs, creating a misty field behind the main figure. Several circular motifs punctuate the upper half: blue disks encircled by yellow and orange rings, including a large one near the top center-right with dark crossed lines inside, and smaller ringed circles to the left. On the far left stands a tall, pale vertical column edged in red-orange, with a gray spiral coil drawn near its top and two pinkish crosshatched panels below. Thin blue and graphite-like lines loop and scribble throughout. In the bottom-right corner, the signature reads: "S. Polke 68."
The piece is in a light brown wood frame.
Artwork Label Text
1966
Watercolor on paper
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1991
Visual Description
A small watercolor on paper—about the size of a standard piece of paper—presents a crude, cartoon-style rendering of a man beside a large, bright, dotted yellow form bordered in smoky gray.
To our left, the man's large, potato-shaped head fills much of the composition: a rounded cheek and jaw are drawn with gray contour lines; the eye is formed by a dark, crescent-like lid and brow, and the mouth is a small dark mark near the lower center of the face. A black-gray patch at the upper left of the head forms hair that is set back from the forehead and painted with blotchy, saturated strokes. The man's clothing is indicated at the bottom with sketchy, intersecting gray lines forming crosshatch and plaid-like patterns.
To our right, the yellow shape bulges out near the figure’s face and is dotted with small ochre-brown spots. It is encircled by a thick gray outline that varies in opacity. Above, two long, dark lines arc across the upper right, while at the upper left several angled, tan-brown strokes stack on top of each other. Near the lower right, there is a curved maroon brushstroke and a separate yellow crescent. The paper shows watery blooms and stains in beige and gray. In the lower right corner, handwritten text reads "Polke 66." The piece is set within a light brown wood frame.
Artwork Label Text
1962
Oil on canvas
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York (fractional gift of Doris and Donald Fisher in honor of Kirk Varnedoe, 2001)
Acquired by the Fisher family, 2001
Tire and Portable Radio belong to a group of paintings of common objects that Lichtenstein extracted from advertisements and catalogs. In Tire, he isolates the object on an otherwise blank canvas and paints it in a crisp, mechanical manner. The repeated chevron pattern recalls twentieth-century geometric abstract painting, and thus connects the language of cheap, mass-reproduced images with that of high art. In Portable Radio, the aluminum stripping and leather handle blur the line between the painting and the object it depicts.
Visual Description
An oil-on-canvas painting—about as tall as an average adult, and slightly narrower than their outstretched arms—depicts a single, isolated black car tire on an off-white background. It is rendered in a crisp, high-contrast style with heavy black outlines. The tire dominates and floats in the center of an otherwise empty composition; the blank background contains no horizon line or other contextual information.
The tire is set at a three-quarter angle, with the circular wheel visible to our left and the thick treaded side facing toward our right. On the left side of the tire, the rim and hub are stylized with concentric rings and simplified mechanical detailing, including a central cap-like form and dark, curved shadows. The tire's rubber sidewall is a deep, nearly solid black band, while the tread is articulated with repeating chevron and zigzag blocks, forming a dense geometric pattern that wraps around the curvature.
The piece is set within a white wood frame.
Artwork Label Text
1962
Oil on canvas with aluminum and leather
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1998
Tire and Portable Radio belong to a group of paintings of common objects that Lichtenstein extracted from advertisements and catalogs. In Tire, he isolates the object on an otherwise blank canvas and paints it in a crisp, mechanical manner. The repeated chevron pattern recalls twentieth-century geometric abstract painting, and thus connects the language of cheap, mass-reproduced images with that of high art. In Portable Radio, the aluminum stripping and leather handle blur the line between the painting and the object it depicts.
Visual Description
A mixed media painting is shaped and painted to depict a vintage hand-held transistor radio. It is about the size of an actual boom box, but flat. The work combines a painted representation on a rectangular canvas as well as three-dimensional elements in other materials: an actual thin leather strap above, and an aluminum strip around the canvas's sides.
The radio body, with its rectangular casing and controls, is rendered in stark, graphic black outlines on a white ground. Across the top runs a banded tuner panel: on the upper scale, the printed FM numbers read "88, 90, 92, 94, 96, 98, 100, 102, 104, 106, 108," and below it the AM scale reads "55, 60, 70, 90, 110, 140, 160," with small triangular marks indicating tuning points. To the upper left sits a circular knob marked by diagonal black stripes. Beside the knob, the labels "FM" and "AM" appear stacked vertically, each preceded by a dot.
The left two-thirds of the radio face is a speaker grille represented by a dense field of evenly spaced black dots framed by a bold border. On the right side of the radio, a clean panel contains the handwritten-style text "AmFm," and along the far-right edge a narrow vertical rectangle suggests a slider or level indicator, filled with short horizontal ticks. A thick black bar extends from the speaker area into the right panel, like a stylized tuning pointer.
The sides of the canvas are covered with a band of thin aluminum. A real leather strap is attached to the top left and right sides of the canvas; it wraps around a real nail several inches above the painting, suggesting that the radio is hanging loosely by its hand strap.
The entire work, including the nail and strap, is installed in a white shadow box frame.