Lichtenstein: seeing is believing: at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, a recent exhibition—replete with visually cunning paintings, works on paper and sculptures—examined Roy Lichtenstein's career-long preoccupation with spatial illusions and the science of perception

Art in America, July, 2002 by Roni Feinstein

One of the central works in the exhibition "Roy Lichtenstein: Inside/Outside," recently presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in North Miami, was a cutout image of a suburban house made of painted wood. The prominence of the piece owed largely to its size--10 1/3 feet high and 16 3/4 feet wide--but the full-scale maquette for House I (1996) also drew attention because of the surprise it delivered to museum visitors: what, from a distance, appeared to be a representation of a house with its three dimensions implied in low relief was actually an arrangement of shapes outlined on three panels set at angles, like a screen. What appeared to be a backward-slanting roof (that is, one receding into depth) was actually a forward-slanting plane.

From the time of his emergence as a Pop artist in the early '60s, Lichtenstein stressed the primacy of form over content in his work and the fundamentally abstract nature of all his compositions. In interviews and statements, he consistently cited his teacher and mentor, Hoyt L. Sherman, a professor at the School of Fine Arts at Ohio State University, as the source of his conception of compositional unity and his interest in issues of perception. Lichtenstein did both his undergraduate and graduate studies at Ohio State (with three years out for army service) and also taught there in the late '40s. The show gave special consideration to Sherman's influence on the artist. (1) "Roy Lichtenstein: Inside/Outside," which was organized by MOCA director Bonnie Clearwater, is the first show to take as its subject Lichtenstein's career-long preoccupation with spatial illusionism and the science of perception. The exhibition's title refers to the flip-flop of space and form (near/far, flat/volumetric, solid/void) occasioned by much of the work selected, as well as to a basic principle of perception that Lichtenstein learned from Sherman: that images received by our eyes and mind ("inside") may or may not correspond to reality ("outside"). (2)

The exhibition included very few classic Pop works. Instead, it skirted comic-derived subjects in order to show how the bold outlines and dotted fields used in such paintings were adapted to other purposes. In fact, the show revealed that the signature style unifying Lichtenstein's work in all mediums for the better part of his career--his bold, graphic vocabulary derived from the language of mechanical reproduction and consisting of sharply defined outlines, primary colors, benday dots and a hatching stroke pattern--had endless potential. The artist employed it for a broad range of formal, spatial and perceptual investigations.

In both the exhibition's catalogue and its extensive wall labels, Clearwater emphasized that Lichtenstein's art had a strong didactic component: he wanted to make viewers aware of their own perception by exposing illusions and offering instruction in ways of seeing. This teacherly edge was tempered by the surprise and delight of Lichtenstein's continually mutating subject matter, by the grace of his handling and by the gentle, self-mocking quality that pervades his art.

Although "Inside/Outside" consisted of work in many mediums (including one hologram and two films), sculptures outnumbered paintings almost two to one. Most of the paintings and drawings executed after the early '60s were chosen because they related to the sculptures as pictorial counterparts, preliminary studies and so on. It is in the three-dimensional pieces that Lichtenstein's interest in perception and spatial illusion is most explicit and most transparent--often literally so, as in the case of works incorporating perforated steel or the openwork pieces in which lines enclose empty space. However, Lichtenstein remained essentially a painter, and the sculptures are usually flat and pictorial and have less conceptual complexity than the paintings. The great value of this stringently focused exhibition (the fact that it did not travel is unfortunate indeed) was that it made the whole of Lichtenstein's oeuvre look different; the show enabled us to see the work with fresh eyes, to approach it with heightened awareness of its formal, spatial and optical complexities.

Hoyt Sherman was an educator of some renown in the 1940s and '50s. His innovative and eccentric drawing course at Ohio State was offered not only to art, architecture and engineering students but also to athletes, dentists and military personnel, all of whom stood to benefit from improvements in their ways of seeing. Sherman's teachings were based on psychological and physical studies of how the mind and eye perceive objects. One of his techniques was the "flash room," where a slide of an abstract drawing would be shown for an instant, and students would then attempt to draw what they had seen. Another exercise involved turning familiar objects such as chairs or tables upside down or suspending them from the ceiling so that they could be seen from new perspectives and as forms in space.

To extend the lessons of his classes, Sherman used 15 model objects or situations that demonstrated principles of perception and optical illusions. The primary lesson taught by these models--that viewers often misinterpret a visual stimulus because of past experience and associations--made a lifelong impression on Lichtenstein. Sherman published a number of handbooks and manuals; those that Lichtenstein owned were displayed in a case near the entry to the show. Among them was Cezanne and Visual Form (1952). Here Sherman lauded the manner in which elements in Cezanne's pictures were adjusted for the sake of the composition, independent of laws of reality. Sherman taught that beginning with Cezanne, modern artists were correct to abandon conventional one-point perspective and to favor the use of overlapping planes to convey distance, as the latter more closely approximates the way the eye and mind comprehend forms in space.