Lichtenstein Bomb Loving

a black and white photo from 1966 of a section of a wooden fence on a vacant lot in los angeles covered in three rows of square paintings by different artists, all meant to protest the vietnam war. a cartoonish picture of a hydrogen bomb mushroom cloud by roy lichtenstein is the most recognizable, on the top left corner.
Detail of the fence surrounding the Artists’ Tower of Protest with Roy Lichtenstein’s Atom Burst, 1965, on the top left corner, via antyfasxystowski

In 1965 Roy Lichtenstein was one of over 400 artists who submitted a 2×2-ft artwork to be installed on Mark di Suvero’s Artists’ Tower of Protest, an anti-Vietnam war pop-up monument which was installed on a vacant lot on the corner of Sunset and La Cienaga in LA. The Peace Tower, as it came to be called, was criticized and attacked, and when the owner of the lot refused to extend the Artists’ Protest Committee’s three-month lease, the Tower was dimantled, and the paintings were sold off, wrapped in brown paper, in an anonymous fundraiser.

Though no museum wanted the Peace Tower itself, Lichtenstein’s painting, Atom Burst, of a mushroom cloud from a nuclear bomb, found its way to the Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth by 1968. For some reason they don’t have a photo of it online, but Pioneer Works does. [Me, I signed away all proceeds from selling my blood plasma and my second born child to the Lichtenstein Foundation when I clicked on the painting’s Google result. At this point it’d probably be less hassle to post an Alamy stock photo of it.]

a roy lichtenstein painting of a mushroom cloud with a very low horizon of the sea, darker blue with double, overlapping benday dots, and the sky, with single benday dots, a lighter blue. the cloud is made of thick black lines like a comic illustration, no shadeing beyond the slight density of vertical lines on one side of the column. this little painting sold at sothebys in 2025.
Roy Lichtenstein, Atomic Landscape, 1966, acrylic, graphite, oil on canvas, 14 x 16 1/8 in., via Sotheby’s

Meanwhile, I guess Roy liked the mushroom cloud enough to make another one for himself. Atomic Landscape (1966) stayed in the artist’s family until last year, when the estate sold it for $1.636 million.

It matters that it’s more a seascape. The images of massive mushroom clouds in the ocean, devoid of the devastation a nuclear bomb would wreak on a city, make it look kind of awesome. Lichtenstein only painted a mushroom cloud twice, but he made over 150 artworks of explosions; the man LOVED to interpret a cartoon explosion. One of the last ones he made was an explosion-shaped trophy for the New York State Governors’ Art Award in 1996. [Fun fact: After being asked to make more for 1997, the Lichtenstein Foundation writes that, “The New York State Council on the Arts confirms that the artist then tacitly agreed to have it reproduced annually.”]

Anyway, when the possibility of deranged despots using nuclear weapons in a failing war of belligerence is now not close enough to zero for disinterested discourse, aestheticizing their destructive power seems like a not such a great idea.