Popular plagiarism:
David vs the Mighty Roy
Rik Pavlescak, the founder of the Collect Dali Yahoo Group, came up with an interesting analogy toward the end of a lively recent discussion among the members about copyright. He cited a 2006 article by Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam on the debate over Roy Lichtenstein’s use of comic-book panels in his pop art.
Beam in turn pointed to the website of David Barsalou, who was then teaching art at the High School of Commerce in Springfield, Massachusetts. On Deconstructing Roy Lichtenstein, Barsalou stacks more than 100 paintings by the artist next to their original comic images. He also published a book with the same title.
Even better are Barsalou’s Flickr pages, which have a lot of well-sourced background information and biographies and photos of the original comic artists, placing credit where it duly belongs.
Barsalou’s efforts demolish the common belief that Lichtenstein created entirely new images based on the look of 1950s and ’60s comics. Even the cartoons’ balloon captions were often scalped intact.
“He tried to make it seem as though he was making major compositional changes in his work, but he wasn’t,” Beam quotes Barsalou as saying. “The critics are of one mind that he made major changes, but if you look at the work, he copied them almost verbatim. Only a few were original.”
Lichtenstein Foundation executive director Jack Cowart argued that “the panels were changed in scale, colour, treatment and in their implications” and Roy never made an “exact copy”.
Amusingly, the foundation’s website can’t be visited unless you first click to agree that you won’t violate the copyright within, and the warning is illustrated with Lichtenstein’s “Grrrrrrrrrrr!!”, a painting of an angry dog that came directly from a comic strip drawn by Joe Kubert. See the rest.
