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Artwork · 1963 · Genre painting

Whaam!

Roy Lichtenstein
1963 · Oil on Canvas
Tate Modern, London
★ 7.5 editorial score

A fighter plane fires a rocket that blasts an enemy jet into a brilliant explosion lettered, in comic-book style, with a huge red-and-yellow WHAAM! Roy Lichtenstein blew up a panel from a war comic to mural scale across two canvases, complete with Ben-Day dots, bold outlines, and a caption box. Now in the Tate, it is among the defining works of Pop art - the throwaway imagery of mass-produced comics elevated, deadpan, to the status of high art, the violence of war rendered as cool, flat, mechanically reproduced spectacle.

Movement
Pop art
Subject
Airplanes

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Quote · 1640

“Yet I doe seriously, and upon good grounds, affirme it possible to make a flying Chariot. In which a man may sit, and give such a motion unto it, as shall convey him through the aire. And this perhaps might bee made large enough to carry divers men at the same time, together with foode for their viaticum, and commodities for traffique. It is not the bignesse of any thing in this kind, that can hinder its motion, if the motive faculty be answerable thereunto. We see a great ship swimmes as well as a small corke, and an Eagle flies in the aire as well as a little gnat... So that notwithstanding all these seeming impossibilities, 'tis likely enough, that there may be a meanes invented of journying to the Moone; And how happy shall they be, that are first successfull in this attempt?”

John Wilkins