Cubist Still Life 1974

Roy Lichtenstein made this painting, Cubist Still Life, as a kind of copy or re-make of Cubism, but in his Pop Art style. He took this very high art, European painting movement and made it into something flat, graphic, and well, a bit trashy? The texture here is all in the surfaces he depicts. Look at the fake wood grain. And he uses those signature Ben-Day dots, originally used for comic book printing. It’s like he's saying: artmaking is a process that’s also a kind of industrialized image-making. I’m struck by how graphic this painting is. I mean, this is paint, but it looks like a print. Lichtenstein really flattened the image, and the original Cubists were already flattening things quite a bit! What does it mean when an image gets flattened again and again? What are we left with? It's like this piece is saying that art is an ongoing conversation with the past.