"I suppose I would still prefer to sit under a tree with a picnic basket rather than under a gas pump, but signs and comic strips are interesting as subject matter"
About this Quote
Lichtenstein is pretending to concede something he has no intention of conceding. The opening clause - a faux-nostalgic preference for the pastoral picnic over the gas pump - nods to the old hierarchy of taste in which art is supposed to elevate you above the everyday. Then he pivots: the real interest is not the tree, but the “signs and comic strips” that modern life insists we look at anyway. The wit is that he frames Pop’s subject matter as a slightly guilty pleasure, even as he’s calmly detonating the idea that “serious” painting must be fed by “serious” subjects.
The subtext is less “I like comics” than “your criteria for what counts as worthy are historically fragile.” A gas pump is the new landscape; signage is the new folk art; the comic strip is a mass-produced mythology with clearer icons than most museums. By staging the choice as a matter of personal preference, he makes a cultural argument without sounding like he’s delivering a manifesto: modernity has already reordered our visual diet, and painting can either deny that or metabolize it.
Context matters here: postwar America, saturated with advertising, automobiles, and cheap printing, plus an art world that still clung to the heroic, inward drama of Abstract Expressionism. Lichtenstein’s deadpan suggests he’s not rejecting beauty - he’s relocating it to the blunt, reproducible images that actually structure American attention. The “interesting” is a tell: he’s elevating the overlooked by treating it as formally and psychologically rich, not just kitsch.
The subtext is less “I like comics” than “your criteria for what counts as worthy are historically fragile.” A gas pump is the new landscape; signage is the new folk art; the comic strip is a mass-produced mythology with clearer icons than most museums. By staging the choice as a matter of personal preference, he makes a cultural argument without sounding like he’s delivering a manifesto: modernity has already reordered our visual diet, and painting can either deny that or metabolize it.
Context matters here: postwar America, saturated with advertising, automobiles, and cheap printing, plus an art world that still clung to the heroic, inward drama of Abstract Expressionism. Lichtenstein’s deadpan suggests he’s not rejecting beauty - he’s relocating it to the blunt, reproducible images that actually structure American attention. The “interesting” is a tell: he’s elevating the overlooked by treating it as formally and psychologically rich, not just kitsch.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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