Forget it! Forget me! 1962

Roy Lichtenstein made this large painting "Forget it! Forget me!" with oil and magna on canvas. I like how he’s taken this really graphic, comic book style and blown it up to a scale that feels almost confrontational. Look at the surface - the flat planes of color, the bold outlines. There's a kind of emotional intensity created through the artifice. This isn’t about subtlety, it’s about hitting you over the head with pure feeling. And the dots! Those benday dots, a signature of Lichtenstein’s, usually printed, here are rendered by hand in paint. There’s something almost absurd about that, this meticulous, painterly labor used to replicate a mechanical process. The woman's face, turned towards us, eyes narrowed, red lips set in a moue. A perfect cartoon of anger and dismissal. Agnes Martin comes to mind, someone else who embraced repetition and pattern, but with a completely different emotional register. With Lichtenstein, the ambiguity is in the tension between the hand-made and the mass-produced, the personal and the generic.