June 15, 2010 from PauloGabriel's blog
Yesterday I ran into something that was a real shocker for me: a website called "Deconstructing Roy Lichtenstein" in which are featured "source" images to virtually all of Litchenstein's work. This is really big.
I've known Lichtenstein work for some time know, but I've never researched his biography, and it seems that it was actually a "problem" he faced in life.
Most of his best-known artworks are relatively close, but not exact, copies of comic book panels, a subject he largely abandoned in 1965. (He would occasionally incorporate comics into his work in different ways in later decades.) These panels were originally drawn by such comics artists as Jack Kirby and DC Comics artists Russ Heath, Tony Abruzzo, Irv Novick, and Jerry Grandenetti, who rarely received any credit. Jack Cowart, executive director of the Lichtenstein Foundation, contests the notion that Lichtenstein was a copyist, saying: "Roy's work was a wonderment of the graphic formulae and the codification of sentiment that had been worked out by others. The panels were changed in scale, color, treatment, and in their implications. There is no exact copy." However, some have been critical of Lichtenstein's use of comic-book imagery, especially insofar as that use has been seen as endorsement a patronising view of comic by the art mainstream; noted comics author Art Spiegelman commented that "Lichtenstein did no more or less for comics than Andy Warhol did for soup." - Wikipedia
Some might even say that the world would not know him if copyright laws were serious back then. We'd like to know your thoughts on this... here are some of the source images from the Deconstructing Roy Lichtenstein website. There's also a Flickr photostream with many of these. Take a good look at them, and tell us what you think. Cheers!
