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Torpedo...Los!

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Torpedo...Los! is a 1963 oil on canvas painting by Roy Lichtenstein. When it last sold in 1989, The New York Times described the work as "a comic-strip image of sea warfare".[1] Like many of Lichtenstein's works it's title comes from the speech balloon in the painting. The source of the image is "Battle of the Ghost Ships?" in D.C. Comics' Our Fighting Fources, (October 1962) although the content of speech balloon is different (this is edition number 72 according to some sources and 71 (a) according to others).[2][3]

Torpedo...Los!
ArtistRoy Lichtenstein
Year1963
TypePop art
LocationPrivate collection

On November 7, 1989 Torpedo...Los! sold at Christie's for $5.5 million (US$14 million in 2025 dollars[4]) to Zurich dealer Thomas Ammann, which was a record for a work of art by Lichtenstein.[1] The sale was described as the "highpoint" of a night in which Christie's achieved more than double the total sales prices of any other contemporary art auction up to that date.[5] The seller of the work was Beatrice C. Mayer, the widow of Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago founder and board member Robert B. Mayer as well as daughter of Sara Lee Corporation founder Nathan Cummings.[6][7] Torpedo...Los! was expected to sell for $3 to 4 million at the time.[6] Prior to the sale the work was part of the Robert B. Mayer Memorial Loan Program and was exhibited at colleges and museums.[6] In 1991, Mayer became one of the key benefactors of the new Museum of Contemporary Art Building.[8]

According to the Lichtenstein Foundation website, Torpedo...Los! was part of Lichtenstein's second solo exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery from September 28 — October 24, 1963 that included Drowning Girl, Baseball Manager, and Whaam!.[9] Although most of Lichtenstein's war imagery depicts American war themes, this depicts "...a scarred German submarine captain at a battle station..."[10] He is a World War II Nazi commander. The manner of depiction with the commander's face pressed against the periscope reflects fusions of industrial art of the 1920s and 1930s.[11] By enlarging the face of the captain relative to the entire field, Lichtenstein makes him more prominent than in the source.[2] He retained the source's "clumsiness" of the secondary figure and replaced the dialogue with a much shorter "cryptic command".[2] The humorous aspect of this 1963 is in part due to its temporal displacement feeding on the World War II during a much later period of the Cold War.[12] The styling of the balloon content, especially that of the large font characters, is complemented by or complementary to the other traditional visual content of the painting.[13]

Notes

  1. ^ a b Reif, Rita (1989-11-09). "A de Kooning Work Sets A Record at $20.7 Million". The New York Times. Retrieved 2012-05-09.
  2. ^ a b c Waldman, Diane (1993). Roy Lichtenstein. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. pp. 96–97. ISBN 0-89207-108-7.
  3. ^ "Torpedo...LOS!". Lichtenstein Foundation. Retrieved 2012-05-20.
  4. ^ 1634–1699: McCusker, J. J. (1997). How Much Is That in Real Money? A Historical Price Index for Use as a Deflator of Money Values in the Economy of the United States: Addenda et Corrigenda (PDF). American Antiquarian Society. 1700–1799: McCusker, J. J. (1992). How Much Is That in Real Money? A Historical Price Index for Use as a Deflator of Money Values in the Economy of the United States (PDF). American Antiquarian Society. 1800–present: Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. "Consumer Price Index (estimate) 1800–". Retrieved February 29, 2024.
  5. ^ Reif, Rita (1989-12-06). "Art Prices Are Still Astonishing, But Fever Seems to Be Cooling". The New York Times. Retrieved 2012-05-09.
  6. ^ a b c Reif, Rita (1989-11-03). "Auctions". The New York Times. Retrieved 2012-05-09.
  7. ^ Gillespie, Mary (1991-01-29). "Donors cite need for new art museum". Chicago Sun-Times. Retrieved 2009-08-23.
  8. ^ Gillespie, Mary (1991-01-29). "Trustees endow success of a new art museum". Chicago Sun-Times. Retrieved 2009-08-23.
  9. ^ "Chronology". Roy Lichtenstein Foundation. Retrieved 2012-05-09.
  10. ^ Coplans, John, ed. (1972). Roy Lichtenstein. Praeger Publishers. p. 40.
  11. ^ Hendrickson, Janis (1993). "The Pictures That Lichtenstein Made Famous, or The Pictures That Made Lichtenstein Famous". Roy Lichtenstein. Benedikt Taschen. p. 38. ISBN 3-8228-9633-0. The Nazi commander of Torpedo...Los! (Ill. p. 20)(1963) refers more definitely to the Second World War. In the superficial world of the comics, only an enemy could have a scar and eyebrows like that. As in so many of Lichtenstein's paintings showing human comic figures, the face has been blown up to an overwhelming size and become a main element in the composition. Perhaps the way it has been pressed up against the telescope, uniting man and machine, was meant to recall such fusions in the industrially-orientd art of the twenties and thirties.
  12. ^ Frascina, Francis, ed. (2000). Pollack and After: The Critical Debate (second ed.). Routledge. p. 141. ISBN 0-415-22867-0. Lichtenstein's Torpedo...Los, cribbed from a comic about a Nazi sub commander, was placed with jokey topicality in the era of Polaris submarines. Here was an art that could shrewdly feed on the Second World War while keeping present, and yet assuaging, the fears of the Cold War.
  13. ^ Madoff, Steven Henry, ed. (1997). "Pop Art: A Critical History". University of California Press. p. 205. ISBN 0-520-21018-2. Torpedo-Los! displays again the artist's awareness of the balloon as an essential factor in the comic allusion. Eliminating the ponderous balloons in the original panel, he adopted his own from a subsequent panel in the same sequence. With respect to the general masses of the composition the balloon's exclusion may not have been detrimental. But in this case the dialogue itself is ingeniously interwoven into the general design. The three alphabetic characters comprising the word "LOS" are clues to the composition's organic design...the dialogue enclosed within the balloon is visually exploited in the interests of compositional structure. {{cite web}}: |chapter= ignored (help); Missing or empty |url= (help)
 

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