Whaam! By Roy Lichtenstein
A famous piece of Pop Art
Roy Lichtenstein was born in New York in October 1923 and died there in September 1997. He became interested in art while at school and studied fine arts at Ohio State University, where he became a teacher with his career being interrupted by serving for three years in the Army between 1943 and 1946.
He experimented with several artistic styles, including cubism and abstract expressionism, until — in the early 1960s — he developed his own highly individual style that made him a leader of the movement known as Pop Art.
Lichtenstein’s most famous technique was derived from American comic strips which used devices such as dot-printing and strong primary colours to enable them to be printed cheaply in mass-circulation newspapers. Lichtenstein simply took these conventions — and actual strip-cartoon images — and blew them up to huge sizes, with “Whaam!” probably being the best-known example.
Whaam! dates from 1963 is now part of the permanent collection of London’s Tate Modern gallery. It is a two-canvas work, thirteen feet wide (in total) and five-and-a-half feet deep. The materials used are acrylics and oils.
The scene is one fighter plane firing at a second plane, which explodes. The attacking plane, in the left-hand panel, is accompanied by the pilot’s…