From the Castelli wall to the Tate, and a credit still owed

Within a few years Whaam! traveled a long way fast. In the autumn of 1963 it hung in Lichtenstein’s second solo show at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York (Castelli being the dealer who, more than anyone, made the market for American Pop Art). Three years later, in 1966, it crossed the Atlantic: the Tate Gallery in London bought it, handled by the dealer Ileana Sonnabend, Castelli’s former wife and another of Pop’s great early champions. (You will see a price of about £3,940 quoted for that sale; it comes from secondary sources rather than the Tate’s own record, so treat it as a footnote, not a fact.) Within three years of being painted, a copied war-comic panel had entered a national collection, where it remains, accession T00897, now at Tate Modern and one of the most famous works of Pop Art, frequently named, with Drowning Girl, as Lichtenstein’s signature image.

There is an argument that follows Whaam! around, and it deserves to be stated straight rather than smoothed over. Lichtenstein built the painting on someone else’s drawing, Irv Novick’s panel in All-American Men of War #89, and he did so the way he did across his comic-based work: he credited the genre, sometimes the comic, but not the artist. He sought no permission, named no illustrator, and paid no royalties. And the picture may owe more than one hand: the same scholars who read it as a composite place Russ Heath’s and Jerry Grandenetti’s drawings inside Whaam! itself, alongside others Lichtenstein drew from across his career, Tony Abruzzo and Jack Kirby among them, working professionals whose panels became famous paintings without their names attached. Decades later the comics artist Dave Gibbons called the practice “copycat,” arguing the work should really read “Whaam!, by Roy Lichtenstein, after Irv Novick.”The gap has been noted to persist: at the Tate, where the painting hangs, Novick’s name has been absent from the work’s own description.

Lichtenstein’s defense was that he transformed what he took: that enlarging, splitting, recomposing, and recoloring a panel changed its purpose so completely that the result was a new thing, a comment on the image rather than the image. There is real truth in that; a thirteen-foot deadpan painting about how culture packages violence is plainly not a war comic. It is also the work that, more than almost any other, licensed what came after it, the appropriation art that would build whole careers on lifting and reframing the mass-media image. But both things are true at once: it is a landmark that opened high art to the everyday image, and it is built on the uncredited labor of working illustrators who never shared in the fame or the money. You can admire the break and still keep Novick’s name in the room. The best way to look at Whaam! is to do both.