Hall of Mirrors

In Hall of Mirrors, Graham Bader traces the development of Roy Lichtenstein's art into, through, and beyond his classic pop oeuvre of the 1960s. Bader charts the trajectory of Lichtenstein's practice from his student days in the late 1940s to his mirror paintings of the 1970s, offering new readings of such canonical paintings as Look Mickey and Girl with Ball as well as examinations of lesser-known works across a range of media. Bader's analysis goes beyond the standard critical view of pop as a reaction to the high-culture pieties of abstract expressionism.

Instead, Bader sees Lichtenstein's work as motivated by the forces of “unoriginal originality”—Lichtenstein's discovery that he could make art by “borrowing” from other images—and “disembodied bodies”—his use of flattened and schematic forms to reinvigorate figurative painting. Bader argues that 1961's Look Mickey, Lichtenstein's inaugural pop work, established a template for the tension between embodiment and disembodiment that animates much of his 1960s.