This retrospective manages to show what Lichtenstein was trying to do very succinctly: use a particular visual language to relate perceptions. Organised thematically, it shows how Lichtenstein tried this in a variety of areas: mirrors, still lives, other 'great works', landscape, nudes, 'low art', abstracts, Art Deco and so on.
This also shows that he didn't succeed in all of these. I think the romance and war nostalgia paintings work very well: the accompanying book describes an uneasy tension between low and high art energising these, and I felt this strongly. I couldn't quite get a grip on them; the colours and dots entice and fascinate, but the subject matter is funny or kitsch. The room is large so the paintings can be approached from close and afar, although looking at dots up close makes your head spin.
Likewise, the still lives struck me like Mondrian, almost ready to topple over off the wall and well-observed in line. The Still Life with Glass and Lemon worked spectacularly well as an optical effect in his visual idiom.
There are parts that I don't think work well now. The parodies are not great; sub-cubism or simply uninteresting. The mirrors were a huge fascination for Lichtenstein, but they are the equivalent of a scientist's notebook for us viewers now, merely a biographical quirk.
The Chinese scroll homages, too, serve to highlight just how good the originals are but don't strike with the force of the war/romance pictures.
The nudes are brilliantly unsettling. At this stage, it feels like he is subverting his own language, creating a portmanteau of critique and perception. I have a strong memory of them for their strangeness.
The curation of the show lets us get both close and far away to some of the mega-sized works which is crucial to look at some of these things, and keeps Lichtenstein's life in the background with a light touch on the info.
If creating a distinctive visual language and then synthesising pre-existing cultural ideas via this lens makes a painter important, then we might as well declare everyone from Basquiat to Vettriano the most important artists of the 20th century. Lichtenstein does this and in some of this best work makes it fun to look at and engages the mind in odd ways, so perhaps he is more important than most, and this makes the retrospective worth more than a fleeting look.
