Roy’s Radio

I always love coming upon this three-dimensional piece by Roy Lichtenstein at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Painted in 1962, it’s a great example of how the artist, best known for his oversized appropriations of comic book illustrations, found beauty in the geometries, textures, and purpose of everyday commercial objects. The dots that depict this radio’s speaker here bring to mind the signature dots of Lichtenstein’s famous paintings, dots that were themselves investigations of the patterns inherent in the printing process. He blew up what was previously invisible, ignored, taken for granted, or merely a subset of a larger story in a different context, and drew attention to details in a manner that made them alternately abstract or hyperreal — sometimes both simultaneously. For the first time, I found myself focusing on the radio station to which this imaginary device is tuned, just above 94 on the clearly selected FM dial. I wonder what station that was at the time, presumably in New York City. (If it’s of interest, I’ve written previously about Lichtenstein’s famed Blam, a painting that also dates from 1962.)