Red Barn 1969

Roy Lichtenstein made "Red Barn" in 1969. I love how he's taken something so folksy, a barn, and zapped it with his signature Pop Art energy. It's like a comic book version of rural America. Check out the flatness of those colors, red, green, black, and white, and the bold outlines. There's no blending or shading. It's all about clean, crisp shapes and those dots, of course! The Ben-Day dots give it that mass-produced feel, like it came straight off a printing press. The dots are key. They take this image away from any sense of realism and make it totally artificial. It kind of reminds me of Alex Katz, another artist who simplifies forms and uses flat color, but Lichtenstein's got that extra layer of irony. It's like he's saying, "Yeah, it's a barn, but it's also a picture of a barn, and a comment on pictures of barns." So, what is more American than all that!