Roy Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns: Early Prints

The gallery is pleased to present Roy Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns: Early Prints, an exhibition of prints made between 1963 and 1975 by two artists who proved that the most familiar images in America were still worth a second look.

Johns, whose flags and targets first appeared in 1958, tends to be described as the artist who made Pop possible. Lichtenstein, who began painting comic strip panels in 1961, is remembered as one of the artists who made it famous. The labels are useful, but they hide how much the two had in common. Both turned away from the private, gestural painting that dominated New York in the 1950s and toward images nobody had to invent: a flag, a number, a beer can, a girl crying in a romance comic. Both understood that a picture of something everyone has already seen forces a question a new image never has to answer: what has the artist added?

The two artists came at printmaking from opposite ends. Lichtenstein's earliest prints were made in commercial offset lithography, the process used to print the comic books he borrowed from, and several began life as exhibition announcements sent through the mail. They look like mass produced things because, in a sense, they are. Johns worked with the professional workshops that were transforming American printmaking in those years, Universal Limited Art Editions on Long Island and Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles, and he used the print to go back over his own earlier work. A flashlight and a pair of ale cans he had made as sculptures return as etchings. A single numeral is buried and brought back to the surface under layers of gray wash.

Hung together, each makes the other easier to see. Lichtenstein's prints are flat, fast, and finished, and next to them it becomes obvious how much Johns leaves unresolved, how many second thoughts his surfaces hold. One artist hides his hand so completely that the hiding becomes the subject; the other lets every decision show. They arrive at the same place from opposite directions, where an ordinary image, looked at long enough, becomes remarkable.

The 1960s were the decade the print moved from the margins of American art to its center. The works here, made between 1963 and 1975, come from the years when that shift was still underway. At a moment when prints are often treated as the accessible end of an artist's work, these sheets are a reminder that for Lichtenstein and Johns the print was never secondary. It was where some of their sharpest ideas were tested. Seeing them together restores the print to the place these artists gave it.