Whaam!

Roy Lichtenstein - Cup and Saucer (1966)

In these sculptures representational conventions are foregrounded and/or made literal. Lichtenstein's intention is to focus our attention on the artist's 'language', the 'how' rather than the 'what', the form rather than the content. In interviews he has stated that it was the abstract qualities of form, colour and the means of depiction that appealed to him about comic strips rather their content. Lichtenstien's work is figurative, and yet it is a subtle kind of abstraction or formalism. For most viewers, however, the content of his work is still important.

'Whaam!', a painting which freezes the decisive moment of violent conflict between two jet fighters, is one of Lichtenstein's most famous works. War comics - the source for 'Wham!' and several other, related paintings - utilize an emblematic style which precludes any sense of the actual horror and suffering of war. Lichtenstein's method of reworking such imagery pushes it even further towards the decorative. Both are examples of what Raymond Williams once called 'the culture of distance': the audience is distanced, shielded from the reality of war by the antiseptic style of representation. Viewers who can imagine what death in air combat must be like may well find the contradiction between 'Whaam!'s' violent content and the cheerful, decorative manner with which it is depicted, chilling.

- John Walker

Roy Lichtenstein - Whaam! (1963)