Roy Lichtenstein

Whaam! 1963 is a large, two-canvas painting by the American pop artist Roy Lichtenstein that takes its composition from a comic book strip. The left-hand canvas features an American fighter plane firing a missile into the right-hand canvas and hitting an approaching enemy plane; above the American plane, the words of the pilot appear in a yellow bubble: ‘I PRESSED THE FIRE CONTROL… AND AHEAD OF ME ROCKETS BLAZED THROUGH THE SKY…’. The outline of the resulting explosion emanates in yellow, red and white; the work’s onomatopoeic title, ‘WHAAM!’, jags diagonally upwards to the left from the fireball in yellow, as if in visual response to the words of the pilot. The painting is rendered in the formal tradition of machine-printed comic strips – thick black lines enclosing areas of primary colour and lettering, with uniform areas of Ben-Day dots, purple for the shading on the main fighter plane and blue for the background of the sky.

The work’s composition is taken from a panel drawn by Irv Novick which appeared in issue number 89 of All-American Men of War, published by DC Comics in February 1962. From the original panel, Lichtenstein produced preliminary drawings, one of which is in Tate’s collection (Drawing for ‘Whaam!’ 1963, Tate T01131). In this drawing, he set out his first visualisation of the painting, including marking the divide of the original single panel into two parts, confining the main plane to one and the explosion to the other. Revealing Lichtenstein’s process of making minor changes during a work’s creation, the colour annotations on the drawing are different to the final colours used in the painting, notably the use of yellow instead of white for the letters of ‘WHAAM!’. To make the final painting, Lichtenstein projected the preparatory study onto the two pre-primed canvases and drew around the projection in pencil before applying the Ben-Day dots. This involved using a homemade aluminium mesh and pushing oil paint through the holes with a small scrubbing brush. Onto this he painted the thick outlines of shapes and areas of solid colour in Magna acrylic resin paint. This use of different materials has made cleaning the painting a particular challenge for conservators (see ‘Conserving Whaam!’, Tate website, 1 March 2018, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/lichtenstein-whaam-t00897/conserving-whaam, accessed 7 November 2018). According to the artist, the diptych took one month to produce from start to finish (Lichtenstein, letter to Richard Morphet, 10 July 1967, Tate Catalogue file).

While Lichtenstein’s work that draws on popular imagery from advertising and cartoons involves a degree of appropriation, the artist himself acknowledged that the act is really one of transformation: ‘I am nominally copying, but I am really restating the copied thing in other terms. In doing that, the original acquires a totally different texture.’ (Quoted in Lawrence Alloway, Roy Lichtenstein, New York 1983, p.106.) By taking the comic strip and using it as he does, he conflates the powerful but so-called ‘low’ mass-produced commercial image with the traditionally venerated medium of large-scale easel painting. Lichtenstein also explained the significance of the military subject matter he chose for many of his paintings during 1962–3: ‘At that time I was interested in anything I could use as a subject that was emotionally strong – usually love, war, or something that was highly-charged and emotional subject matter. Also, I wanted the subject matter to be opposite to the removed and deliberate painting techniques.’ (Lichtenstein in John Coplans, ‘Interview with Roy Lichtenstein’, Artforum, May 1967, p.36.) He saw the style of cartoons, with their easily digestible lines and primary colours, as an appropriate vehicle for painting a dramatic scene in a detached, calculated manner.

The choice of cartoon to represent military action arguably also renders the scene ridiculous and juvenile. Although the intention of the original publication of the comic may have been to show glorious, action-filled images of ‘All-American Men of War’, through Lichtenstein’s quasi-absurdist treatment, the scene is turned into what art critic Alastair Sooke has described as ‘a tongue-in-cheek male daydream of aggression, conquest and ejaculatory release’ (Alastair Sooke, Roy Lichtenstein: How Modern Art Was Saved by Donald Duck, London 2013, p.2). Considering Whaam! was created in 1963, just as the Vietnam War was gathering steam, and taking into account Lichtenstein’s own service in the US Army in 1943–6, this deconstruction of military heroism could be read as a statement on the folly of war. Lichtenstein explored the imagery of explosion in two other works in Tate’s collection, Wall Explosion II 1965 (Tate T03083) and Explosion 1965–6 (Tate P01796).

The content, conceptual basis and production of Whaam! makes the viewing of the work full of contradictory dualities which are never fully resolved – highly charged subject matter rendered in a dispassionate, detached style; commercial art in a fine art context; the mass-produced image painstakingly rendered by hand in a unique painting; the familiarity of the imagery and its alien application in scale and medium. Many of these dualities chime with ideas explored in the wider pop art movement by the likes of Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg.

Further reading
Diane Waldman, Roy Lichtenstein, London 1971, pp.16–17, reproduced p.72.
James Rondeau and Sheena Wagstaff (eds.), Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective, London 2012, p.39, reproduced pp.160–1.
Nathan Dunne, Roy Lichtenstein, London 2013, pp.17–18, reproduced pp.40–1.

Arthur Goodwin
November 2018