Roy Lichtenstein and Plagiarism

984 Words4 Pages
Art today is driven by many things, but perhaps the most common force is one's need to be original. Artists' today believes that they must develop their own style, and if that style is taken, they must find one, invent one, fabricate one, for he can be nothing if he cannot be original. Is that truly an acceptable ideal? How do you separate innovative ideas from those that are derived from being inspired by others? R. G. Collingwood, once called ‘one of the twentieth century's best-known "neglected" thinkers’ portrayed art as a "necessary function of the human mind, and considered it collaborative, i.e., a collective and social activity." However, there is a thin line between collaborative and plagiarizing another artist. At the center of such discussions will always be one particular artist. Heavily influenced by both popular advertising and the comic book style, Roy Lichtenstein (October 27, 1923 – September 29, 1997) was a prominent American pop artist. I will establish the true definition of plagiarism as the overall basis to warrant the claim for either side of the argument, as well as present qualifiers for both sides of the argument. Lichtenstein, in 1961, began his first Pop Art paintings using cartoon images and techniques derived from the appearance of commercial printing. His first work to feature the large-scale use of hard-edged figures and Benday Dots was Look Mickey, which came from a challenge from one of his sons, who pointed to a Mickey Mouse comic book and jokingly dared him to recreate it. He later produced six other works with recognizable characters from gum wrappers and cartoons that same year. Lichtenstein would continue this style of “replicating” published art throughout the mid 60s, painting works such as Whaam (painted in 1963), one of the earliest known examples of pop art, and Drowning Girl (painted in 1963). Lifting comic-book
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