Primary Mover: How Roy Lichtenstein Conquered Pop

Masterpiece, 1962. Lichtenstein was perhaps the first painter in western art history to make primary colours work together.

At the beginning of Roy Lichtenstein’s career, just before the young artist found himself at the centre of the pop art storm, he produced an abstract painting, Untitled, 1959.

The painting is, by any measure, a failure. It’s awful: lurid and fussily composed — an ugly streak of red, blue and yellow terminates in a smudge of black and white. Primary colour daubings are just hanging against plaster-like grey as if the artist had wiped his brushes clean on the canvas.

But in those trite brushstrokes, and particularly in the choice of colours, we detect the ambition — audacity even — behind the innovative aesthetic triumphs to come. This painting is too bold, too vibrant to work. What self-respecting painter would paint in primaries? Primary colours are just a “no”. At least, that is, in 1959.

Untitled, 1959, is a fussy mess.

Art has always had an uneasy time with primary colours. Primary colours just don’t work together. They are by definition at opposite ends of the colour wheel; they’ll never get on.

Alexander Rodchenko’s red, yellow and blue monochromes, an astonishing piece of avant-gardism from the Russian revolution, were painted on separate…