Whaam! is a 1963 diptych painting by the American artist Roy Lichtenstein. It is one of the best-known works of pop art, and among Lichtenstein's most important paintings.How Lichtenstein's "Whaam!" Became a Monumental Symbol of Pop Art - Sotheby's on YouTube Whaam! was first exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City in 1963, and purchased by the Tate Gallery, London, in 1966. It has been on permanent display at Tate Modern since 2006.
The left-hand panel shows a fighter plane firing a rocket that, in the right-hand panel, hits a second plane which explodes in flames. Lichtenstein adapted the image from several comic-book panels, with the primary source being a panel illustrated by Irv Novick from a 1962 war comic book. Lichtenstein transformed the source by presenting it as a diptych while altering the relationship of the graphical and narrative elements. Whaam! is regarded for the temporal, spatial and psychological integration of its two panels. The painting's title is integral to the action and impact of the painting, and displayed in large onomatopoeia in the right panel.
Lichtenstein studied as an artist before and after serving in the United States Army during World War II. He practiced anti-aircraft drills during basic training, and he was sent for pilot training but the program was canceled before it started. Among the topics he tackled after the war were romance and war. He depicted aerial combat in several works. Whaam! is part of a series on war that he worked on between 1962 and 1964, and along with As I Opened Fire (1964) is one of his two large war-themed paintings.
Background In 1943 Lichtenstein left his study of painting and drawing at Ohio State University to serve in the U.S. Army, where he remained until January 1946. After entering training programs for languages, engineering, and piloting, all of which were canceled, he served as an orderly, draftsman and artist in noncombat roles. One of his duties at Camp Shelby was enlarging Bill Mauldin's Stars and Stripes cartoons. He was sent to Europe with an engineer battalion, but did not see active combat. As a painter, he eventually settled on an abstract-expressionist style with parodist elements. Around 1958 he began to incorporate hidden images of cartoon characters such as Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny into his abstract works.
A new generation of artists emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s with a more objective, "cool" approach characterized by the art movements known today as minimalism, hard-edge painting, color field painting, the neo-Dada movement, Fluxus, and pop art, all of which re-defined the avant-garde contemporary art of the time. Pop art and neo-Dada re-introduced and changed the use of imagery by appropriating subject matter from commercial art, consumer goods, art history and mainstream culture. Lichtenstein achieved international recognition during the 1960s as one of the initiators of the pop art movement in America. Regarding his use of imagery MoMA curator Bernice Rose observed that Lichtenstein was interested in "challenging the notion of originality as it prevailed at that time."
Lichtenstein's early comics-based works such as Look Mickey focused on popular animated characters. By 1963 he had progressed to more serious, dramatic subject matter, typically focusing on romantic situations or war scenes. Comic books as a genre were held in low esteem at the time. Public antipathy led in 1954 to examination of alleged connections between comic books and youth crime during Senate investigations into juvenile delinquency; by the end of that decade, comic books were regarded as material of "the lowest commercial and intellectual kind", according to Mark Thistlethwaite of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Lichtenstein was not a comic-book enthusiast as a youth, but was enticed as an artist by the challenge of creating art based on a subject remote from the typical "artistic image". Lichtenstein admitted he was "very excited about, and very interested in, the highly emotional content yet detached impersonal handling of love, hate, war, etc., in these cartoon images."
Lichtenstein's romance and war comic-based works took heroic subjects from small source panels and monumentalized them. Whaam! is comparable in size to the generally large canvases painted at that time by the abstract expressionists. It is one of Lichtenstein's many works with an aeronautical theme. He said that "the heroes depicted in comic books are fascist types, but I don't take them seriously in these paintings—maybe there is a point in not taking them seriously, a political point. I use them for purely formal reasons."
History Whaam! adapts a panel by Irv Novick from the "Star Jockey" story from issue No. 89 of DC Comics' All-American Men of War (February 1962). The original forms part of a dream sequence in which fictional World War II P-51 Mustang pilot Johnny Flying Cloud, "the Navajo ace", foresees himself flying a jet fighter while shooting down other jet planes. In Lichtenstein's painting, both the attacking and target planes are replaced by different types of aircraft. Paul Gravett suggests that Lichtenstein substituted the attacking plane with an aircraft from "Wingmate of Doom" illustrated by Jerry Grandenetti in the subsequent issue (#90, April 1962), and that the target plane was borrowed from a Russ Heath drawing in the third panel of page 3 of the "Aces Wild" story in the same issue No. 89. The painting also omits the speech bubble from the source in which the pilot exclaims "The enemy has become a flaming star!"
A smaller, single-panel oil painting by Lichtenstein around the same time, Tex!, has a similar composition, with a plane at the lower left shooting an air-to-air missile at a second plane that is exploding in the upper right, with a word bubble. The same issue of All-American Men of War was the inspiration for at least three other Lichtenstein paintings, Okay Hot-Shot, Okay!, Brattata and Blam, in addition to Whaam! and Tex! The graphite pencil sketch, Jet Pilot was also from that issue. Several of Lichtenstein's other comics-based works are inspired by stories about Johnny Flying Cloud written by Robert Kanigher and illustrated by Novick, including Okay Hot-Shot, Okay!, Jet Pilot and Von Karp.
Lichtenstein repeatedly depicted aerial combat between the United States and the Soviet Union. In the early and mid-1960s, he produced "explosion" sculptures, taking subjects such as the "catastrophic release of energy" from paintings such as Whaam! and depicting them in freestanding and relief forms. In 1963, he was parodying a variety of artworks, from advertising and comics and to "high art" modern masterpieces by Cézanne, Mondrian, Picasso and others. At the time, Lichtenstein noted that "the things that I have apparently parodied I actually admire".
Lichtenstein's first solo exhibition was held at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City, from 10 February to 3 March 1962. It sold out before its opening. The exhibition included Look Mickey, Engagement Ring, Blam and The Refrigerator. According to the Lichtenstein Foundation website, Whaam! was part of Lichtenstein's second solo exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery from 28 September to 24 October 1963, that also included Drowning Girl, Baseball Manager, In the Car, Conversation, and Torpedo...Los! Marketing materials for the show included the lithograph artwork, Crak!
The Lichtenstein Foundation website says that Lichtenstein began using his opaque projector technique in 1962. in 1967 he described his process for producing comics-based art as follows:
Whaam! was purchased by the Tate Gallery in 1966. In 1969, Lichtenstein donated his initial graphite-on-paper drawing Drawing for Whaam!, describing it as a "pencil scribble". According to the Tate, Lichtenstein claimed that this drawing represented his "first visualization of Whaam! and that it was executed just before he started the painting" as cited in Although he had conceived of a unified work of art on a single canvas, he made the sketch on two sheets of paper of equal size—measuring . The painting has been displayed at Tate Modern since 2006. In 2012–13, both works were included in the largest Lichtenstein retrospective yet exhibited, visiting the Art Institute of Chicago (22 May – 3 September 2012), the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (14 October – 13 January 2013), the Tate Modern in London (21 February – 27 May 2013) and the Centre Pompidou (3 July – 4 November 2013).
Description Whaam! depicts a fighter aircraft in the left panel firing a rocket into an enemy plane in the right panel, which disintegrates in a vivid red-and-yellow explosion. The cartoon style is emphasized by the use of the onomatopoeic lettering "WHAAM!" in the right panel, and a yellow-boxed caption with black lettering at the top of the left panel. The textual exclamation "WHAAM!" can be considered the graphic equivalent of a sound effect. This was to become a characteristic of his work—like others of his onomatopoeic paintings that contain exclamations such as Bratatat! and Varoom!
Whaam! is one of Lichtenstein's series of war images, typically combining vibrant colors with an expressive narrative. Whaam! is very large, measuring 1.7 m × 4.0 m (5 ft 7 in × 13 ft 4 in). It is less abstract than As I Opened Fire, another of his war scenes. Lichtenstein employs his usual comic-book style: stereotyped imagery in bright primary colors with black outlines, coupled with imitations of mechanical printer's Ben-Day dots. The use of these dots, which were invented by Benjamin Day to simulate color variations and shading, are considered Lichtenstein's "signature method". Whaam! departs from Lichtenstein's earlier diptychs such as Step-on-Can with Leg and Like New, in that the panels are not two variations of the same image.
Although Lichtenstein strove to remain faithful to the source images, he constructed his paintings in a traditional manner, starting with a sketch which he adjusted to improve the composition and then projected on to a canvas to make the finished painting. In the case of Whaam!, the sketch is on two pieces of paper, and the finished work is painted with Magna acrylic and oil paint on canvas. Although the transformation from a single-panel conception into a diptych painting occurred during the initial sketch, the final work varies from the sketch in several ways. The sketch suggests that the "WHAAM!" motif would be colored white, although it is yellow in the finished work. Lichtenstein enlarged the main graphical subject of each panel (the plane on the left and the flames on the right), bringing them closer together as a result.
Lichtenstein built up the image with multiple layers of paint. The paint was applied using a scrub brush and handmade metal screen to produce Ben-Day dots via a process that left physical evidence behind. The Ben-Day dots technique enabled Lichtenstein to give his works a mechanically reproduced feel. Lichtenstein said that the work is "supposed to look like a fake, and it achieves that, I think".