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.
Cowart is correct in saying nothing was copied precisely, but the variation was minimal, not just in the comic panels that Roy projected in large scale and then traced but in the dozens of commonplace household items he “reproduced” as art, from balls of twine to mirrors.
To his credit, Cowart doesn’t trot out the old defence — that Roy and others were elevating low-brow comics to high art.
Attorney Mark Weissburg once attended a Lichtenstein exhibition in Chicago and reacted with an article titled “Roy Lichtenstein, Copyright Thief?”, expressing amazement that Roy had never been sued for incorporating other people’s art into his own.
That baffled intellectual-property attorney Stacy Friends too, who suggested to Beam that “there might have been some historic leeway for fine art” back in the 1950s and ’60s, and/or that some of the copyright holders did force a private settlement.
There is, of course, no longer such redress for the cartoonists, since the statute of limitations for copyright infringement is three years.
DC Comics artist Russ Heath, whose panels were among the ones Lichtenstein appropriated, said the publishers probably declined to sue because they would have reaped little money for the effort.
Marvel Comics’ George Tuska saw a 1961 sci-fi panel he drew become Lichtenstein’s “Emeralds”, which sold at auction in 1999 for $1.6 million.
“We are all in favour of having the drawers and writers receive as much credit as humanly possible,” Cowart said. “We owe them esteem, but can’t pay them back for the royalties they might have received.”
At right, in another image from Barsalou’s Flickr site, what Mort Walker, the creator of Beetle Bailey, thought of the whole thing.
Meanwhile the commercial artists who drew the original logos and designed the bottles and boxes for Coca-Cola and Brillo had already been sitting back and watching Andy Warhol make major cash and become famous off their creations.
Ironically, Warhol was pretty ticked off in 1961 when he heard that Lichtenstein had started doing comic panels with speech balloons, an idea he’d pioneered the year before. Roy had been using comic-book imagery since 1957, but this was a fresh addition. Imagine the umbrage.
Final irony: I’m using Barsalou’s copyrighted images without permission.
This blog’s namesake, Salvador Dali, enjoyed the occasional plagiarism, quite proudly so. Skip to the part about the sheep and horses in this post at my Dali biography site, Dali Planet. And the essay doesn’t even mention the Barnum & Bailey Circus tigers he copied from a poster for 1944’s “One Second Before Awakening from a Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate”.
“To imitate is not important,” Dali said. “To be inimitable is most important.”
