Creativity Quote by Roy Lichtenstein

Lichtenstein gives you the whole Pop Art predicament in one gag: he’s admitting influence while preemptively mocking the idea that influence should produce faithful heirs. The line is a tightrope walk between deference and deflation. “I don’t think that I’m over his influence” nods to Picasso as the unavoidable weather system of 20th-century painting; you don’t “move past” him so much as paint under his pressure. Then Lichtenstein punctures the piety. His work “probably don’t look like Picassos” because looking like Picasso is the wrong test - an art-school misunderstanding of how lineage actually functions.

The real knife twist is the imagined reaction: “Picasso himself would probably have thrown up.” It’s funny, but it’s also a shield. By staging Picasso as the disgusted gatekeeper, Lichtenstein dramatizes the anxiety around legitimacy that haunted Pop: the suspicion that cartoon aesthetics, commercial printing, and irony were unserious compared to the heroic myth of the modernist genius. He answers that suspicion with a joke that’s also a confession: yes, the canon might hate this. That doesn’t make it derivative; it makes it disruptive.

Context matters: Lichtenstein’s early 1960s breakthrough leaned on appropriation and mechanical-looking surfaces, a deliberate affront to the gestural sincerity of Abstract Expressionism and the reverent, protean image of Picasso. The “thrown up” line turns reverence into a bodily response, collapsing high-art worship into something human, messy, and oddly freeing.