1 Gustavo Martinez

The year 1961 marks Roy Lichtensteins appropriation of comics in his paintings and the decadence of his abstract expressionist phase, 1957-60. Popeye, 1961, being one of his several Pop art paintings features Popeye, a spinach-enriched sailor, knocking out his rival Bluto with a round house left modernism.1 Primary colors are prevalent and swift black lines are utilized to signify motion and also to bind the figure and objects. Yet these bounded figures in Popeye have a profound allegorical meaning that I will examine with methodology Social history of art, and to do this I will focus on Roy Lichtensteins embodiment as Popeye, Popeye as a signifier of the United States during war, and how Popeye is used to symbolize American Pop art. American Pop art insisted on a direct relationship between its use of the imagery of mass production and its adoption of modern technological procedures.website2 During this period of an arising popular culture, Pop art was threatening to open the floodgates of commercial design and drown out fine art.mo book Lichtensteins began to make paintings based on tabloid cartoons and advertisements m book, which were a product of mass production.3 Roy believed that comics were more than a fund of imagery, though they were that; they were also a source of systematic technique (alloway).4 This was the beginning of Roys new style of painting, and unfortunately his abstract expressionist phase of the late 1950s was beginning to stray away. The painting Popeye, suggests this implication through its portrayal of combat. Roy in this case can be considered Popeye the sailor man, ruling out Bluto or his abstract expressionist past by beating him. Furthermore, the painting also adopted an industrially readymade technological procedure, in which Roy selected a panel from a comic strip, sketched it, then projected his drawing with a projector, traced the image on the canvas, adjusted it to the picture plane, and finally painted with primary colors. M book5 Lichtenstein actually insisted on painting in primary colors because as in Mondrian, his primaries evoke a non-natural world, signaling the

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ready-made nature, the second nature, of media. Foster) 95 Roy was amused to see what colors had the greatest impact one another, and contrast was what advertising was all about; thus, adapting print images to the demands of advanced painting 106 was his primary goal. Through his procedure the spatial play of Abstract Expressionism was completely eliminated. Popeye was able to enter the demand of advanced painting, but was critically charged as banal. Although the painting is adopted from a comic book, essentially Popeye is used to symbolize American Pop Art knocking out Bluto, abstract expressionism. By embracing popular culture as subject matter (alloway), Lichtenstein was able to grasp everyones attention and broke social class barriers . Consequently, critics attention wasnt focused on abstract expressionism but on Pop art. By adopting a lean, flat way of painting that defined the picture plane as a finite zone in opposition to the spatial play of abstract expressionism,alloway Pop art was beginning to gain critical attention around the world, and with the death of Jackson Pollock, mainstream critics were not happy with this new turn of events and styles. Thus, Popeye perfectly resembles Pop, because of the Spinach can, a postwar object that Popeye consumes. Similar to Popeye the sailor man, Lichtenstein also need to consume, and comics were at his disposal, leading to the rise of an American Pop art style of painting. However, Popeye not only symbolized Lichtenstein and Pop Art, he was also an allegory of the United States. One can immediately notice that Popeye is an American Sailor because of his anchor tattoo and his red, white and blue uniform. During the 60s, when this painting was created, the United States was in conflict with Vietnam, Soviet Union, and Cuba. The Vietnam War was in its climax. In southeast of the United States, CIA agents were trying to invade Cuba and overthrow Fidel Castro, the Cuban Missile crisis. While on the other end of the globe, the Soviet Union possessed a nuclear weapon that marked the beginning of tension with the United

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States, marking the beginning of the Cold War. Similar to Popeye, the United States was using his fisks in the name of justice, to gain control of the tension created by warfare. Consequently, Pop art was born during a great period of time, when consumption and production was necessary to maintain the United States as a dominant and powerful forerunner of the world.

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Bibliography followed by notes Foster, Hal, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin h. d. Bluchloh. Art Since 1900: 1945 to the present. New York: Thames & Hudson Inc. , 2007. Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve -Alain Bois, and Benjamin h. d. Bluchloh, Art Since 1900: 1945 to the pre sent, (New York: Thames & Hudson Inc. , 2007), 445 -49. Alloway, Lawrence. Roy Lichtenstein. New York: Abbeville Press, 1983. L a w r e n c e A l l o w a y, R o y L i c h t e n s t e i n , ( N e w Y o r k : A b b e v i l l e P r e s s , 1 9 8 3 ) , chap. 13-19. Foster, Hal. The First Pop Age. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2012. H a l F o s t e r , T h e F i r s t P o p A g e , ( P r i n c e t o n , N e w J e r s e y: P r i n c e t o n University Press, 2012), 93 -106. Livingston, Marco. Oxford University Press, "MOMA: Art Terms: Pop Art." Last modified 2009. Accessed May 4, 2012. http://www.moma.org/collection/theme.php?theme_id=10170. Wikipedia. Popeye. 29 April 2012 at 17:50. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popeye Wikipedia. 1960s. 2 May 2012 at 10:11. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960s

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