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Whaam Roy Lichtenstein Analysis

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Roy Lichtenstein was born in 1923 in New York. During the late 1930s Lichtenstein, studied at the Art Students League of New York. During WWII, he served in the U.S. military, but was able to pursue an artist education at Ohio State University throughout the 1940s. Lichtenstein was influenced by the Cubist and Expressionist movements during the 1950s, which motivated him to follow current trends in the Pop Art style of the early 1960s. This led to the experimentations with comic book art as a parody of “modern art” stylistics, which utilized large-scale acrylic paintings of comic book imagery. “Whaam!” (1963) was one such experiment, which utilized a comic image of two Cold War planes enacting aerial combat in DC Comics' “All-American Men of …show more content…

In medieval Christian diptychs, the theme of life was often represented on side panel, which was countermanded by an image of death on the other panel. “Whaam!” show the left canvas of the diptych depicting a jet dealing death to another jet on the right –side canvas. The jet firing at the other plane is shown with a blurb coming out of the cockpit: “"I pressed the fire control... and ahead of me rockets blazed through the sky..." (Lichtenstein). Clearly, the representation of the victory of life by the shooter in the jet plane is part of this sequential dualism of life and death in this diptych style. On the right hand canvas, the image of an exploding jet defines the loser of the aerial combat mission, which goes down in a fiery explosion. This sequence of events is defined through the application of a medieval diptych style, which shows the progression of life and death in a comic book illustration caption. This style of painting reveals the dualistic nature of the Cold War being expressed through medieval painting styles that divided two canvases or panels to show the show life and death as a sequential

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