Botanical Briefing: Pop Goes the Easel: Roy Lichtenstein Does Claude Monet with Dr. Carol Ockman

Roy Lichtenstein’s Haystacks and Water Lilies are informed by the same commercial Pop aesthetic that gave us his celebrated works inspired by comics and advertising. Focusing first on his work of the sixties, this lecture explains how Lichtenstein arrived at his first Monet-inspired series from Giverny, the Haystacks, and why he came back to Monet 25 years later in his series of Water Lilies. As we look closely at works in the exhibition, we will discover not only how radically Lichtenstein’s pop versions of Monet’s works differ from their sources but also, more surprisingly, how much they share.

Carol Ockman is a writer, performer, curator, and Robert Sterling Clark Professor of Art History Emerita at Williams College (Williamstown, Mass.), with dual specialties in French art from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and contemporary art and culture. She earned her doctorate and master’s degrees in Art History from Yale University and a bachelor’s degree in the same subject, as well as Italian, from Stanford University.