What was beneath the gallery wall
For as long as there had been fine-art painting, it drew on high sources: myth, history, religion, the human figure, landscape, and, by the middle of the 20th century, the artist’s own raw feeling poured out in visible brushwork. Abstract Expressionism, the style Lichtenstein came out of, prized exactly that, the gesture, the drip, the trace of the hand, paint as the record of a soul at work. Comic strips, advertising, and pulp illustration sat on the other side of an unspoken line. They were commercial craft: cheap, anonymous, machine-printed, made to sell and be thrown away. They did not hang in museums, and the line between the two was not supposed to be crossed.
Whaam! crosses it three ways at once. First, the source: the worst of commercial art, a throwaway war comic, becomes legitimate raw material for a serious painting. Second, the surface: the Ben-Day dot, the cheap mechanical texture of newsprint, becomes a deliberate fine-art surface, the look of mass reproduction turned into a thing you paint by hand and hang on a wall. Third, the hand: the work is made to look impersonal, machine-printed, “programmed,” the exact opposite of the expressive brushstroke it grew up next to. Hand-made to look machine-made. That inversion, human labor disguised as the machine, is the Pop break in a single image.
“I want to hide the record of my hand”
Lichtenstein said what he was after about as clearly as an artist ever does. In the catalogue for his 1967 retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum, in conversation with the curator John Coplans, he put it this way:
“I want my painting to look as if it has been programmed. I want to hide the record of my hand.”
, Roy Lichtenstein, in Roy Lichtenstein (Pasadena Art Museum, 1967), interview by John Coplans
Read it against everything we just saw being made. He wanted the painting to look programmed, as if a machine had output it, with no person visible in the doing. And he wanted to hide the record of his hand, the very thing Abstract Expressionism had built its whole religion on showing. The deep joke of Whaam! is that hiding the hand took an enormous amount of hand: every flat field, every black outline, every grid of dots laid down through a screen, all of it slow handwork performed to erase the evidence of handwork. The machine look is the most human thing about it.