Salute to Aviation 1968

Roy Lichtenstein made this ‘Salute to Aviation’ screenprint using commercial printing techniques. Here, the artist embraced a mechanized aesthetic, intentionally mimicking the Ben-Day dots of newspaper and comic strip printing. This was decidedly not the stuff of traditional "fine art" at the time. The image is built up from solid planes of primary color, sharply delineated. Note the way that texture is conveyed, not through painterly gesture, but through the careful, uniform application of the dot matrix. In this print, Lichtenstein draws upon a visual language of mass production, nodding to the rising tide of consumer culture. It's interesting to consider the amount of skilled labor that actually went into producing what seems like a very impersonal image. This underscores the sly brilliance of Lichtenstein's Pop project. It asks us to reconsider what we value in art, and how the social and economic context of production shapes our understanding of creative work.