Revelations

I've been wanting to check out the Roy Lichtenstein exhibit at the National Gallery since it opened a few months ago.  In fact, we've been to the National Gallery a few occasions since then but I never quite made it to the exhibit until yesterday.  If you're any kind of fan of Lichtenstein's work, you'll want to see this.  Photography is prohibited (I snapped one photo of a painting that wasn't restricted) so you'll have to go yourself.  If you thought that Lichtenstein was all pop art and comic strips, you're wrong, as was I.  What I love to discover when viewing a larger collection of an artist's work is the side you don't often see.  For Lichtenstein it is a collection of paintings he did based on Chinese landscapes.  They are done in his unique style but have the distinct flavor of a classical Chinese landscape watercolor.  And they are divine.  The interplay of the soft, organic forms of a Chinese landscape against the modern, harder Lichtenstein style really worked for me.  And beyond the paintings themselves, it was the fact that he had any interest in Chinese painting at all that really interested me.