“I have always had this interest in a purely American myth💛ological subject matter.🎃”

- Roy Lichtenstein (Roy Lichtenstein, quoted in “An Interview with Roy Lichtenstein,” interview by John C𝓡oplans. Artforum, Octobܫer 1963)

Ubiquitously mundane imagery and commercially commonplace scenes are transformed by Roy Lichtenstein into enigmatic patriotic symbols in La Nouvelle Chute de l’Amérique (The New Fall of America). Accompanied by French translations of poems by Beat writer Allen Ginsberg, the suite of works exemplifies Lichtenstein’s intuitive and witty approach to cultural commentary. The complete illustrated book, executed in 1992, is thꦺe result of a truly singular collaboration between two prolific and trailblazing American visionaries.

Lone highways, mountain range sunsets, glittering fireworks, and roiling cityscapes are foreshortened in Lichtenstein’s signature Pop style. Articulated through bold lines and the artist’s iconic Ben-Day dots, these truncated perspectival spaces take on a dreamlike and liminal nature. By flattening popular images, Lichtenstein bestows them a compositional complexity that recalls modes of consumer advertising while strengthening formal principles and pictorial conventions native to early Modernism. Like Picasso’s Cubist forms, Lichtenstein’s kaleidoscopic compositions serve to exacerbate the dissonance between recognizable subjects and the viewer’s own comfort in them. All together, these graphic renderings are transformed into sleek icons of a lost Americana; they evoke a wistfulness for 🃏and strangeness in these familiar patriotic landscapes. 

The artist’s mastery of his signature Pop idiom and pioneering investigation into the form, meaning, and content of Contemporary art coincided with the technical renaissance of American printmaking. Lichtenstein’s distortions of cartoon styles and commercial subject matter confronted postwar American consumer culture head-on – his comic strip-sourced compositions, primary colors and Ben Day dots speak to a pictorial vocabulary wedded to modes of mechanical reproduction. As curators James Rondeau and Sheena Wagstaff put it, "Lichtenstein remains an artist of absorbing contradictions. His inventiveness is rooted in imitation; he transformed the very idea of borrowing into a profoundly generative, conceptual position, one that alters the trajectory of Modernism, and beyond." (James Rondeau and Sheena Wagstaff, “Introduction,” in Exh. Cat., Art Institute of Chicago, Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective, 2012, p. 20).

La Nouvelle Chute de l’Amérique puts Lichtenstein’s visual commentaries in direct dialogue with that of the poet Allen Ginsberg. A prolific literary force in his own right and pioneering member of the Beat Generation, Ginsberg published his collection of poems The Fall of America in 1972, which went on to win the annual U.S. National Book Award for Poetry. The Fall of America is an extensive literary statement by Ginsberg that addresses the political and societal unrest resulting from America’s role in the Vietnam War as well as heightening racial tensions on the homefront. Here, Roy Lichtenstein illustrates a new French edition of the book. The synergy that emerges in La Nouvelle Chute d'Amérique is the result of Ginsberg and Lichtenstein’s shared dedication to interrogating the declining attributes of their homeland, worn away by social upheaval and industrial 🐲reach. 

Roy Lichtenstein’s merging of serene landscapes with Cubist industrial visions in La Nouvelle Chute de l’Amérique offers a contemplation of American culture in a dizzying consumerist era. His sleek and stylized icons of Americana adopt an ironic tone when paired with Ginsberg’s writings anꦏd ⛦draw from Ginsberg’s own instinctive and emotive style. The artist effectively synthesizes the poet’s prophetic messages into suggestive and surreal vignettes of contemporary America; together, they encapsulate the inherent dissenting American spirit of their generation.