Blam, 1962
Oil on canvas, 68 x 80 in. (172.7 x 203.2 cm)
Gift of Richard Brown Baker, B.A. 1935
1995.32.9
©Estate of Roy Lichtenstein
In the early 1960s, Lichtenstein began to use the Benday dot technique popular in commercial printing to make large-scale paintings with comic-strip imagery. The artist navigated the minefield of categories used to differentiate between high and low culture—unique/reproduced, original/copy, high culture/mass culture—by creating a formally resolved composition of an exploding airplane rendered through a controlled, repetitive, and seemingly mechanical technique. Blam defies the highly lauded expressionistic practices of the abstract American painters of the 1950s, a goal made evident by the artist's presentation of a highly charged emotional effect thoroughly mediated by the means of its construction and its translation into high art.
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