SFMOMA, Part 26: Floor 2, 1900 to Now. Rouen Cathedral, Set 5 (Roy Lichtenstein, 1969).
Monet painted the Rouen Cathedral more than thirty times between 1892 and 1894 — dawn, noon, dusk, fog, sun — chasing the light across the stone facade, trying to render, in his words, "what is between the motif and me." Lichtenstein, born in 1923, three years before Monet died, looked at the photographs of those paintings and did the opposite. He rebuilt the cathedral out of dots. Strict grids of large, uniform Ben-Day dots in limited binary color pairs, applied through perforated metal stencils — Impressionism's broken color recoded as print halftone. Three slightly different facade views in three different color schemes: his structural pun on Monet's times of day. "I thought using three slightly different images in three different colors as a play on different times of day would be more interesting." The image resolves only at a distance — exactly like a Monet, but mechanized. He called them his "manufactured Monets." His own phrase, from the LACMA didactics.
Rouen Cathedral, Set 5 (1969) is a triptych, oil and Magna on canvas, sixty-three by one hundred forty-two inches — nearly twelve feet wide. Magna is the solvent-based acrylic-resin paint he used through the 1960s, before true acrylics. The dots were rubbed through the stencils with, among other tools, a toothbrush — Sotheby's lot-essay detail — "a painstaking labor meant to make a picture look as though no one had labored over it at all." Smarthistory's Steven Zucker: "The irony is that Lichtenstein painted these by hand." And Lichtenstein himself, on the labor paradox at the heart of the series: "It's an industrialized way of Impressionism, by a machine-like technique... but it probably takes me ten times as long to do one of the Cathedrals or Haystacks as it took Monet to do his." The machine-looked painting is slower than the hand-looked one. The factory is a performance. The hand never left.
The 1966 turn
The Cathedrals belong to the pivot. Lichtenstein's comic-strip phase — 1961 to 1965, Whaam!, Drowning Girl, the first Castelli solo in 1962 that sold out before it opened — made him the face of Pop. Then, in 1966, he turned from mass culture to art history itself: the Modern Paintings, sixty-plus works, quoting the modernist canon in dots and diagonals. The Cathedrals (1969) are the turn's high monument. The opinion split. Dave Hickey, on the Modern Paintings: "alive in the eternal present as singular confrontational objects... You only look away out of cowardice, never out of boredom." LACMA's 2011 Monet/Lichtenstein framing: he took an image "cheapened by overexposure" and reinvested it "with renewed, ironic vigor." NGA curator Harry Cooper, on NPR in 2012: "bringing these artists down to the level of dots and comic vocabulary... the anxiety of influence... he realized he could make it his own, and that felt good" — and the work proved Pop "wasn't just a gimmick."
The seed was institutional. Lichtenstein coined "manufactured Monets" when he saw photographs of Monet's Cathedrals while planning John Coplans's 1968 Serial Imagery exhibition at Pasadena — the show that argued Monet invented seriality. So the Cathedral paintings are Lichtenstein answering the thesis literally: if Monet invented the series, here's the series rebuilt by the machine age. Monet chased light. Lichtenstein mixed formula. Monet stood in front of the stone. Lichtenstein stood in front of a photograph of a painting of the stone. Richard Pettibone, miniaturist of appropriation, painted a tiny Roy Lichtenstein Rouen Cathedral in 1969-70, at Artforum-reproduction scale — a copy of a copy of a copy. The regress was already complete before the paint dried.
The Andersons
SFMOMA's Set 5 came as a gift of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson in 1992 — "Hunk" and "Moo," Saga Corporation fortune, Atherton and Menlo Park, who collected postwar American art for fifty years. The 1992 gift — thirty Pop works, the core of SFMOMA's Pop holdings — is why Warhol, Lichtenstein, Indiana, Oldenburg, Rosenquist hang on Floor 2 as a coherent bloc: one couple's eye. (In 2014, 121 Anderson works went to Stanford instead — the famous Bay Area story — but the 1992 Pop tranche stayed.) Kenneth Baker: "Probably no private collection illustrates the course of American art since World War II better than that of... the Andersons."
And note the pairing the floor hands you: SFMOMA's other Lichtenstein, Mirror #2 (1970, Part 28), is also an Anderson 1992 gift, one year apart, also oil and Magna, also a multi-panel polyptych. The Cathedral looks backward — art history through a dot-grid, appropriation. The Mirror looks at painting itself — the sign for glass, self-reflexivity. Art-about-art from opposite directions, one year apart. The Floor 2 double-feature.
So here's the thesis: Rouen Cathedral, Set 5 is the moment Pop ate art history and discovered it was delicious. Monet's seriality — thirty cathedrals chasing the light — becomes Lichtenstein's seriality: three facades, three color schemes, dots through a stencil, ten times slower than the original. "My work isn't about form. It's about seeing." What it sees is the whole twentieth century at once: the Impressionist's plein-air vigil, the printer's halftone screen, the museum's overexposed postcard, the artist's hand performing the machine. Manufactured Monets, handmade. The cathedral is still there, twelve feet wide, resolving at a distance — exactly like a Monet. Exactly unlike one. 🌁
Timeline — Roy Lichtenstein
1923 — born October 27, New York City
1961 — Look Mickey; first Ben-Day dots
1962 — first Castelli solo; sells out before opening
1966 — the art-history turn; Modern Paintings
1968 — Coplans's Serial Imagery, Pasadena; "manufactured Monets" coined
1969 — paints the Rouen Cathedral sets; parallel Gemini lithographs
1992 — Anderson gift brings Set 5 to SFMOMA
1997 — dies September 29, New York, age 73