The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, or SF MOMA, took to Twitter earlier this week to wish a happy birthday to Roy Lichtenstein, the pop artist who came to fame in the 1960s and passed away in 1997.
Lichtenstein is notorious in comics circles, and not in a good way. Many of his paintings were copies of comic book panels by artists like Jack Kirby, Russ Heath and Irv Novick, and rarely did he credit the original artists, nor were they compensated. As such, many comic artists and fans have called him a copycat at best and a plagiarist at worst. (Well, maybe not “at worst;” I’m sure much has probably been said about him that’s worse than that).
SF MOMA, however, seems to have a different opinion. In their description on social media, they said: “Lichtenstein transferred the clichéd comic-book compositions to the canvas with a projector and simplified them; the resulting paintings mimic the appearance of four-color printing, despite being meticulously handmade.”
“Clichéd comic-book compositions.” Yep, they really tweeted that out.
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