The Painter Who Adored Women
“Roy Lichtenstein: Girls,” at the Gagosian Gallery, presents 12 of Lichtenstein’s early paintings of the female creatures otherwise known as women. Based on 
cartoons and mostly blond, they are anonymous, beautiful and often unhappily bothered, usually by men. Or, if you like, by boys.
After all, as Dorothy Lichtenstein, the artist’s widow, remarks in an interview in the show’s catalog, “Roy adored women.” And the anonymity of his subjects has exceptions. The smiling woman in “Sound of Music” is clearly Julie Andrews about to burst into song as musical notes stream through the window — although her cheer is undercut by the sharp black shadow that divides her face into areas of red and blue, not unlike the stripe of green in Matisse’s Fauve portrait of his wife in a hat.
Mrs. Lichtenstein notes that Lichtenstein painted on an easel that allowed him to turn each canvas so he could be sure that its power operated in all orientations. It had to work abstractly, in other words, in a way that couldn’t be missed.
In the earliest works here — “Forget It! Forget Me!,” “Little Aloha” and even the classic “Masterpiece” (where the female lead speaks the prophetic words “Why, Brad darling, this painting is a masterpiece!”) — the dots are faint and uneven, not quite pulling their weight. But they quickly gain size and substance and diversify. For example, women’s lips are often rendered not in solid red but in Ben-Day stars, stripes or little bow-tie shapes that stand out from the Ben-Day dots of the faces.
The Ben-Day dots allow Lichtenstein’s painting to look both more and less artificial. They signify mechanical reproduction, but they also add suggestions of light and reflection, shifting colors and variations in touch. The reflections would eventually lead to Lichtenstein’s many portrayals of mirrors, but first they seem to have spawned ceramic sculptures and works in porcelain enamel on steel, a small selection of which is included in the Gagosian show. On their shiny surfaces, fake reflections and shadows — like the aggressive, tattoolike scattering of Ben-Day dots on “Head With Red Shadow” — compete with real ones.
Mrs. Lichtenstein’s catalog interviewer is, perhaps appropriately, the latter-day Pop artist Jeff Koons, who as usual alternates a golly-gee robotic air with genuine perceptions. Sometimes he blends the two, as when he says: “I always loved how Roy’s work really challenges life force because it tries to compete with life force in the realm of the artificial. He would try to have the artificial keep up and challenge the power of life.”
This is another museum-quality show from Larry Gagosian’s gallery, and, as is often the case here, everything has a double function, like serving up artists that any dealer would like to represent. Not only is there Mr. Koons’s interview with Mrs. Lichtenstein; Richard Prince, who just left the Gladstone Gallery and is about to have a show at Mr. Gagosian’s gallery in Rome, contributes a small inserted brochure. It juxtaposes each of 22 steamy pulp-fiction covers of books (all titled with female first names) with a Lichtenstein woman painting. The illustrations of scantily clad, curvaceous femme fatales would seem to be the last thing Lichtenstein had in mind.
What he had in mind was form, a transformation of the terms of real and fake that, as Mr. Koons suggests, was beyond either, a thing in itself. This show makes especially clear how Lichtenstein’s work functions as a kind of primer in looking at and understanding the grand fiction of painting: the thought it requires, its mechanics, its final simplicity and strangeness. These great paintings convey all this in a flash of pleasure, compounded by the thrill of understanding.
“Roy Lichtenstein: Girls” continues through June 28 at the Gagosian Gallery, 980 Madison Avenue, near 77th Street, (212) 744-2313, gagosian.com.