Practicality VS Artistic Expression
I so much like Roy Lichtenstein’s “Interior with Mobile” in MoMA. It is very minimal, just a few colors, but you would call it very colorful. It gives the feeling of a colorful cartoon. You don’t realize you don’t see any shaded of brown or purple in there. Somehow the full range of colors is implied.
That said, the image in the mirror is kind of mind-blowing. Let’s see — what could it be? Is it really a window or is it a mirror? If it’s a window, with a glass, then it means that a very surrealistic “waiting room,” with a mirror is on the other side of the window. It is hardly possible, but it’s still possible. What is way more likely is that it’s a mirror, of what lies on the side of the observer. It’s not clear how that perspective could be serviced, but I could imagine somehow, that behind us, from observer’s perspective, there’s the couch with the mirror, that gets reflected on the actual mirror. This mirror case is probably wrong because then, the vase should also be reflected and it isn’t.
The most likely explanation though, is that it’s just a painting. Let’s see what that painting means. It depicts the same painting that is there, above the bed. That’s weird. This means that the same person painted both paintings. Maybe it’s an odd genre of some artist. The fact that the owner of those two paintings has two paintings of the same artist, might mean there’s some relationship between them. It’s also likely that it’s the owner of the flat. But which artist would put two of his/her paintings in a single room? So closely related paintings? Probably someone very egocentric. Someone who really loves their work and wants to look at it every day and every night.
On the other hand, it’s somewhat weird, the fact that the mirror-painting is framed while the one above the bed is not. What does that mean? The same painting isn’t framed even within the mirror-painting. Curious, isn’t it? Does this say that the artist has a value judgment of one piece of art vs. the other? That they thought that the framed one is more complete than the other one since they bothered to frame it? Wouldn’t the artist want to have the painting above the bed also framed? What if they frame it? Do they destroy the mirror-painting, in the context of the room, since it will no longer be realistic? I think the answer is yes. The painting above the bed should always remain unframed, and it’s intentional the way it is. Lichtenstein even made the frame yellow to emphasize that it’s intentional.
Could this imply that he wants us to pay attention to everything that is yellow? Let’s see. The bed lamps are yellow, but only their circle parts. They could easily fit in the bed painting and replace the sphere. It reinforces that this bedroom has been decorated by someone very intentionally.
Same applies for this hatstand, decoration, flower or whatever this thing on the left is. It has a little circular thing that is yellow and then another elliptical one. Ok. That’s about it. Then, what’s that yellow thing on the very front? Initially, I thought it’s a table, because it very much looks like a table, but after some thought, I think it’s just a carpet on the floor. That one, as well as the white and the left blue part, should all be parts of that carpet. This would leave the red-patterned one and the other blue as part of that decorative hatstand. Ok. So this yellow allowed us to get some perspective and clarified the geometry of the room.
What do the two pillows on the bed mean though? I think they just want to emphasize that… well, the rest of the bed isn’t yellow! What it tries to say — I think, is that “hey — look — all this bed — it’s so boring. So dull that I had to paint that pillow yellow because otherwise, you wouldn’t even notice it. I think that’s right. No one would see the bed if it weren’t for those yellow pillows.
Which makes use wonder, what else wouldn’t we notice? What else is white? The bed, two bedside tables, the wall behind the mirror-painting and the dresser. That’s all that is “unimportant” and white. Is this a good choice? I think yes. These (except the wall) are the things that someone would always use the most, so the decorator wants to use to ignore them. What this implies is that “I don’t care about practicality. All those trivial things are insignificant, and they could easily fade on the background without us losing something. This is an artist’s room.”
There are a few other minor details. The box in the painting above the bed. That also has the color/pattern of the wall. You could have the same effect by cutting that painting and removing the front face of the box. Interesting.
What’s more interesting, though is that this doesn’t happen in the mirror-painting. The wall there is dull-white. This makes us support that the above-the-bed painting was designed first, with that wall in mind, while the mirror-painting was painted, while the artist had the other painting out-of-context in their atelier, on exhibition or something else. It’s an interesting thing saying “hey — you can use the same thing “in context” where it looks perfect, but you can also use it “out of context” to contrast the two. The natural and the retrofitted.”
Finally, there are two chairs in the view. The one seems to be the yellow at the very right. It’s not very clear it’s an actual chair, but it could well be. The other is the red one in the small wall painting. This last one is red. This is the weirdest part of the entire painting. If you remove it, the whole painting is more harmonious. It doesn’t fit. But as soon as you focus on it, it stands out in a very discrete way. That chair is looking straight at you. It isn’t aligned with the wall. If it were, it would have roughly the same angle as the carpet. But it doesn’t. It looks straight at you. The more you focus on that, the more the white elements seem to pop-out of the picture and start to connect. First the wall, then the dresser, then the bed. It’s like the the the other colorful elements fade in the background and suddenly the room feels asphyctic and packed. Maybe that’s the perspective you get by sitting in that chair. Sitting and focusing on the practical aspects of your life, makes your life smaller. Perhaps, after all, this is a painting about Practicality VS Artistic Expression.
