The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Roy Lichtenstein · acrylic and oil on canvas, two canvases hung side by side as one painting, 172.7 by 406.4 cm overall, each panel 172.7 by 203.2 cm · a fighter plane firing at the left under a caption in the pilot’s first person, a second plane breaking apart in a red and yellow burst at the right, the word WHAAM! lettered across it · 1963 · first shown at the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, 1963 · bought by the Tate in 1966, shown at Tate Modern, London · the unit scored is the diptych as one painting, neither panel alone; both panels whole, nothing known lost or replaced
Mode
History painting at the size of its tradition, made from a comic panel in the code of the printed page; a duel in two canvases
Mythos
Single combat in the air, the knight of the sky, fire from heaven and the warrior’s boast of the kill; the duel built by the split, the rest inherited from the genre
Phase
1963, two years after the first comic paintings, at the close of Abstract Expressionism and in the first years of Pop
Presentation
Acrylic and oil on two abutting canvases, 172.7 by 406.4 cm overall; black contour, flat primaries, fields of dots and drawn lettering
Register
Cool in the handling, loud in the effect; one height, at the burst, held below transport
Scale
Two aircraft, one rocket, one caption, one word; war, the machine, the printed media, a self and a death in one moment
Governing Proposition
Two canvases hang edge to edge, four metres wide together. On the left a fighter plane fires, and above it a caption in the pilot’s calm first person reports the shot; on the right a second plane breaks apart in a burst of red and yellow, and the word WHAAM! is lettered across the fire. Only the rocket’s trail crosses from one canvas to the other. The wager of the painting is that a panel from a war comic, copied by hand in the code of cheap printing and enlarged to the size of a history painting, will show the convention by which killing reached its public, and show a mass image to be a made thing.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Whaam! is two canvases hung side by side as one painting, acrylic and oil, dated 1963. Together they measure 172.7 by 406.4 cm, an area of about seven square metres and a width a little more than twice and a third the height; each panel is 172.7 by 203.2 cm, a little wider than it is tall. The work scored is the diptych as one painting. Neither panel is scored alone, since neither is the work: the left panel is a deed without its consequence, the right a consequence without its cause.
On the left a fighter aircraft fires, its rocket trail running across to the right, and above it a caption box speaks in the pilot’s first person. On the right a second aircraft breaks apart in a burst of red and yellow, white at the centre, and the word WHAAM! is lettered across the fire. Everything is drawn in black contour and laid in flat primaries, and the sky is a field of dots. Of all the painting holds, only the rocket’s trail and the plane’s line of fire are carried across the join.
The painting was first shown at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in 1963. The Tate bought it in 1966, against public objection, and it has been in the national collection for sixty years, shown now at Tate Modern. Both panels survive whole, as made; nothing in them is known to be lost or replaced, and nothing stands in place of an original. The other war paintings of 1962 to 1964, Blam, Takka Takka, Torpedo...Los! and the triptych As I Opened Fire, are its context and are not scored.
Movement II
The caption reads: “I PRESSED THE FIRE CONTROL... AND AHEAD OF ME ROCKETS BLAZED THROUGH THE SKY...” It is about sixteen words, the only sentence in the painting, and it belongs to the only person in it. The pilot is not seen; his aircraft is, a plane made generic by design. What the painting gives of him is his voice, and the voice is calm. He reports the shot as a procedure, a control pressed and rockets seen ahead.
The other pilot has no voice and no body. Where he was, there is a burst. The killer narrates and the killed is a sound, and the painting puts them on separate canvases, so that the one who speaks never shares a frame with the one who dies. This is the sharpest thing the painting shows: that in the printed culture of its period killing reached its public already converted, into a sound effect, a primary colour and a heroic first person, and that the conversion leaves no one to mourn.
Whether the painting holds that conversion up to judgment or simply enjoys it, it does not say. The stance is withheld: critique, delight or neither. The withholding is part of what the painting is, and it costs the painting something. Much of what it discloses is a meaning about representation, about how an image of war is made and received, and much of what a viewer takes from it the viewer brings.
Movement III
The source is a panel by Irv Novick in a DC war comic of 1962, All-American Men of War. In the source, the attacker and his target shared a single frame. The painting divides them. It sets the plane that fires on one canvas and the plane that burns on another, and lets only the line of fire cross between, so that the shot has an interval to traverse and the striker and the struck stand in separate worlds.
That division is the painting’s own, and it carries the oldest structure the painting holds. Single combat in the air, the knight of the sky, fire sent from heaven, the warrior’s boast of the kill: the war comic carried all of these, and the painting inherits them as the genre’s conventions. But the duel itself, deed and consequence on two canvases that cannot meet except by the line of fire, is built rather than borrowed. Elsewhere the particular stays particular: two aircraft, one rocket, one word.
The painting also simplifies its source. The planes are reduced, the space is opened, the word is enlarged. Whether that transformation is enough to make the image Lichtenstein’s rather than Novick’s is one of the questions the painting has carried for sixty-three years, alongside whether it is a critique of the culture of war or a celebration of its graphics, and what its Cold War date and the war in Vietnam that followed do to it. The questions remain open, though much of the return they ask is to Pop and to appropriation rather than to this canvas.
Movement IV
At four metres wide the burst on the right is larger than a person. Its tongues of red and yellow flame and its white centre read at a distance as pure force, and the word sits in it like a shout. The scale turns a page’s small excitement into something one stands before. It is the one height in the painting, sustained by size and brightness; the left panel prepares it, and the register around it stays cool.
The coolness is in the handling. The contour is even, the dots are uniform, the colour is printed colour. The dots are made by hand, and graded in size and density so that the sky reads at a distance and dissolves near: a machine’s mark made by a person, the whole argument of the painting in its smallest unit. The primaries are set so that the burst outweighs the entire left panel, and the lettering of WHAAM! is drawn to be read as sound. The range of mark is narrow by design and the hand suppressed on principle; the attacking plane and the smoke are drawn more stiffly than the burst.
One law governs it all. Speech, sound, fire, smoke, metal and sky are converted into the code of the printed page, black contour, flat primary, field of dots and drawn lettering, so that even the sound is a drawn shape and even the fire has an outline. The law holds across the join, from the narrator’s words on the left to the event they narrate on the right. It is a narrow territory chosen on purpose, one code for one moment, and the code is the source medium’s before it is the painting’s.
Movement V
The turn was made two years before. In 1961, with Look Mickey and the first comic and advertisement paintings, the painter put the comic panel and the look of cheap printing where New York painting had put the gestural mark, the sign of the self; the comic paintings were shown at Castelli in 1962, and met derision as well as buyers. Warhol made comic paintings in the same year. By 1963 the path was proven and Pop had its exhibitions and its market. Whaam! is that turn enlarged to the scale of history painting and made complete, with authority, rather than the turn itself.
Its reach has been very wide, and much of it is shared. From the Tate purchase of 1966, a public argument in its own right, the painting became the emblem of Pop in Britain. The dot and the comic onomatopoeia became a universal idiom of design and image, and the debate the painting carries, about appropriation and the uncredited source, runs to the present. Much of that belongs to the idiom and to the painter as much as to this canvas.
After sixty-three years the painting stands whole, while the culture it quoted is gone: the war comic of 1962 no longer exists as a popular form, and the image is now better known than its source ever was. What it holds is war and the state at arms, the machine, the printed media, a self in the caption’s “I” and a death in the burst. What it leaves out is the dead pilot as a person, family, labour, history beyond the genre’s, nature but for a cloud, and any sacred order. It is one moment in one code, held whole. What keeps it below Tier IV is that it widens a swerve rather than making one, inherits its myth more than it builds it, and rises once: a major painting, at the top of Tier III.
Act III · The Twelve
The parts are few, and the subtractive test mostly fails to find slack. Remove the caption and the burst loses its speaker: the “I” who pressed the fire control is the only person in the painting, and the kill is narrated in his calm. Remove the word and the explosion is pictured but not heard, and the painting’s argument, that a death arrives as a sound printed in yellow, goes with it. Remove the split and attacker and target share a frame, as in the source; the join makes the shot cross an interval. The dots, contour and flat primaries are the code the painting is about. What yields is the cloud forms, some of the smoke and a plane generic by design. The cap clears with room.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Disclosed through image, and credited fully. What can be stated: that killing, in the printed culture of the period, reaches its public already converted into a convention, a sound effect, a primary colour and a heroic first person; that the convention can be lifted, enlarged and shown as convention by a hand that copies it coolly; and that a painting may be made from a reproduction and still be a painting. The second pilot, the one who dies, is not visible as a person: the burst stands where he was, and that absence is the sharpest disclosure. What holds the axis short of the gate is that the meaning is chiefly about representation, and the painting withholds its stance, critique, delight or neither, so that much of what it discloses the viewer supplies.
Score: 7.8 / 10
There is a real jolt, and it is physical. At four metres wide the burst is larger than a person, its red and yellow tongues of flame and white centre reading at a distance as pure force, and the word sits in it like a shout. The scale turns a page’s small excitement into something one stands before. But the register is cool on purpose: the contour is even, the dots are uniform, the colour is printed colour, and the painting gives the effect of an explosion rather than the experience of one. It rises once, at the right panel, and the left panel is preparation. One height, sustained by scale and brightness and held deliberately below transport, is what keeps the axis under the Universal Minimum.
Score: 7.1 / 10
The archetypes are present and mostly evoked. Single combat in the air, the knight of the sky, fire sent from heaven, the warrior’s first-person boast of the kill: the comic genre carries all of them, and the painting inherits them as convention. In one place the myth is built. The diptych is the structure of the duel itself, striker and struck, deed and consequence, set on two canvases that cannot meet except by the line of fire; that structure is load-bearing and the painting’s own, since the source panel did not divide. The particular stays particular, two aircraft, one rocket, one word, and the myth is the genre’s more than the work’s. That holds the axis below the Universal Minimum and far below the gate.
Score: 7.2 / 10
The inheritance is New York painting after Abstract Expressionism, whose gestural mark was the sign of the self. The departure is total in kind: a painting that copies a comic panel, by hand, in the look of cheap printing, at the scale of history painting, and puts a war comic’s sound effect where the heroic brushstroke was. The cost of the move was real; the comic paintings of the early 1960s met derision as well as buyers. But the turn was made in 1961, with Look Mickey and the first comic and advertisement paintings, and shown at Castelli in 1962; by 1963 the path was proven and Pop had its exhibitions and its market. Whaam! is the turn enlarged and made complete, with authority: a swerve widened, not first made.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Would a different form change what the work knows? Almost entirely. Printed small in a comic, the panel is the thing the painting is about, not a painting about it; the knowledge exists only in the transfer to canvas, by hand, at size. The dots made by hand are the knowledge: a machine’s mark made by a person, showing the mass image as made. The diptych is the knowledge: the split turns a single panel into a duel and gives the shot an interval to cross. The scale is the knowledge: enlargement makes the convention visible as convention. Held below the top because the content of the panels is largely given by the source, and the form’s knowledge is the same in the other war paintings of these years.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Evidence over promise: sixty-three years of return, and the questions remain open. Is it a critique of the culture of war or a celebration of its graphics? What do its Cold War date, and the war in Vietnam that followed, do to it? What does it owe Irv Novick, and is the transformation, the split, the simplified planes, the enlarged word, enough to make the image Lichtenstein’s? Is it, as the painter’s own formalism would have it, a composition of balanced shapes that happens to be a war? These questions are real and sustained. Held below the top because much of the return is to Pop, to appropriation and to the painter’s method rather than to this canvas, and the object once seen yields its image whole.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Field: American painting of the early 1960s, at the close of Abstract Expressionism. The intrinsic force is the comic painting’s reorganisation of what a painting may take as its source and its mark: the mass-printed image and its mechanical code admitted at full scale into high art. That force is the painter’s move of 1961, which this work states most fully, and it is shared with Warhol’s comics of the same year. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: very wide. The painting became the emblem of Pop in Britain from the Tate purchase of 1966, itself a public argument; the Ben-Day dot and the comic onomatopoeia became a universal idiom of design; and the debate about appropriation and the uncredited source runs to the present. Discounted because much of that reach belongs to the idiom and the painter, not to this canvas alone.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Survival of the image, weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at sixty-three years. Form: both panels whole, the image as made; no loss or replacement is known, and none is invented. Presence: in a national collection since 1966, shown at Tate Modern and reproduced without end; fame is presence, not proof, and lifts the figure only so far. Fabric: acrylic and oil on canvas, whose flat colour and unmodulated grounds show damage readily, a general risk charged lightly. Against it stands a surface fixed to its moment: the war comic of 1962 is gone as a popular form, and the painting must stand without the culture it quoted. So far it does, and the image is better known than its source ever was. A tenth below the widest figure for its span.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Judged as command of painting, to the same anchors as any medium. The making is exact and load-bearing. The contour is drawn with a firmness and economy the source does not have; the dots are graded in size and density so that the sky reads at a distance and dissolves near; the primaries are set so that the red and yellow of the burst outweigh the whole left panel; the lettering of WHAAM! is drawn to be read as sound. The composition improves its source, simplifying the planes and opening the space. The costs: the range of mark is narrow by design, the hand is suppressed as a matter of principle, and the drawing of the attacking plane and the smoke is stiffer than the burst. Level with the best of its decade, below the summit of the medium.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the caption box, words in a calm first person, and the explosion, a shapeless thing of fire and light. They obey one law. Everything, speech, sound, fire, smoke, metal and sky, is converted into the code of the printed page: black contour, flat primary, field of dots and drawn lettering. Even the sound is a drawn shape, and even the fire has an outline. The law holds across the join and across the range from text to event, from the narrator’s words to the thing he narrates. Held below the top because the territory is narrow by choice, one code governing one moment, and because the law is given by the source medium more than discovered by the painting.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The orders held: war and the state at arms, in the dogfight; the machine, in the aircraft; mass culture and the printed media, in the code and the source; the self, in the “I” of the caption; death, in the burst where a man was. They are integrated, one conversion seen in each, and the integration is achieved. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the dead pilot as a person, any family, any labour, any history beyond the genre’s, nature but for a cloud, and any sacred order. It is one moment in one code, and the figure describes the form; it clears its own floor of 6.0 with room.
Score: 6.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.9, then The Living Form, The Made and The Inner Law at 8.4, and The Inevitable at 8.3. A painting whole after sixty-three years in a national collection, its image now better known than its source; a form in which the transfer by hand, the split and the scale are themselves the knowledge; a making whose contour, graded dots and set primaries improve on the comic panel they copy; one code governing speech, sound, fire and sky across the join; and few parts, each required.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.4: war, the machine, the printed media, a self and a death held in one conversion, with the dead pilot as a person, family, labour, history, nature and the sacred left out. Next above it, The Sublime at 7.1 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.2: one height, at the burst, held deliberately below transport; and a myth of single combat inherited from the genre, built only in the split of the duel. Then The Swerve at 7.7: the turn of 1961 enlarged with authority in 1963, a swerve widened rather than first made.
The Necessity Cap clears: The Inevitable at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.4, The Made at 8.4, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four of five: The Imperishable at 8.9 clears the bar of 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.2, The Unconcealment at 7.8, The Swerve at 7.7 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.2 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Sublime, 7.1, and The Archetypal Deep, 7.2, both below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.4. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: the twelve sum to 94.6, an average of 7.88 that displays as 7.9, at the top of the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Whaam!, painted by Roy Lichtenstein in 1963 in acrylic and oil on two canvases, 172.7 by 406.4 cm overall, each panel 172.7 by 203.2 cm; first shown at the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, in 1963, bought by the Tate in 1966 and shown at Tate Modern; known in its composition, colour, lettering and dimensions and in the outline of its history. No image or written source was consulted. The work scored is the diptych as one painting; neither panel is scored alone. Both panels survive whole, nothing is known to be lost, replaced or repainted, and nothing stands in place of an original. The source panel by Irv Novick in All-American Men of War (DC, 1962), the painter’s preparatory drawing and the other war paintings of 1962 to 1964 are context and are not scored. The words quoted are the title, the lettered word WHAAM! and the caption on the left panel, whose words are certain; the caption’s line breaks are not reproduced. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the issue of the comic in which the source appeared, the size of the source panel and so the factor of enlargement, the month of the first showing, the paint used in each passage, whether the dots were laid through a screen, and the painting’s conservation history.