ART GALLERY
Photograph by Robert McKeever, courtesy of Gagosian Gallery
©Estate of Roy Lichtenstein, N. Y. & JASPAR, Tokyo, 2013 E0434
- Varoom!
- Lichtenstein rose to fame as a major Pop artist in the 1960s with his large-scale imagery of comic-strip panels and popular advertising, rendered in stenciled Ben-Day dots, a technique of using half tone dots derived from the commercial printing industry. The clichés of the comic-strip, such panel comic-book frames and dialogue balloons, are often presented verbatim. In the case of this painting, the onomatopoetic lettering "Varoom!," figures prominently with the smoke and fanfare of explosions and scattering debris, all represented in the primary colors of red, blue, and yellow with radiating lines. Although Lichtenstein made a series of war-themed works from 1962 to 1964, based on scenes of collision and explosion in war comics, Varoom! is an extract of only the element of 'explosion', and bereft of the context of a particular scene.