Reflections On A Mermaid: Roy Lichtenstein (1994)

About the Film

Synopsis

Featuring exclusive, extensive, intimate and never-before-shown documentary coverage of one of the most influential and innovative artists of the 20th century, REFLECTIONS ON A MERMAID: ROY LICHTENSTEIN (1994) contextualizes Lichtenstein’s iconic creative process.

Presenting in-studio creation, gallery openings and installations of his internationally-renowned Mermaid collection, this half-hour documentary celebrates Roy Lichtenstein’s unique achievements by bringing to younger generations and serious collectors alike some playful and detailed insights into the lasting value of art.

REFLECTIONS ON A MERMAID: ROY LICHTENSTEIN (1994) also chronicles the creative quest of the U.S. Olympic medal-winning sailor Kevin Mahaney, who also skippered the 1995 America’s Cup contender "Young America" that is famously covered by Lichtenstein’s Mermaid. Seeking to cement his legacy and demystify Lichtenstein’s creative process, Mahaney aspires to organize an unprecedented show of the artist’s entire Mermaid collection. By enlisting the cooperation of many distinguished galleries and museums from New York and New England to Japan, Mahaney somehow manages to mount an extraordinary show in an improbable location — for a Mermaid.

Director and Cast

Theodore Bogosian

Theodore Bogosian is a veteran ﬁlmmaker and television producer with scores of primetime network documentary and episodic drama credits. Bogosian and his programs have won top prizes everywhere from the National Press Club to the Chicago Film Festival to the Writer’s Guild of America, East, as well as multiple Emmy nominations and awards. His achievements include the ﬁrst documentary produced in High-Deﬁnition (The Press Secretary, 2001.) Since 1978, Bogosian has personally secured access to and conducted interviews with dozens of newsmakers, including several US Presidents, Vice-Presidents and other national candidates, as well as Nobel Prize recipients, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Sally Ride, and many others. His worldwide charitable work includes multiple African and Eurasian trips for foundations promoting clean water, education and human rights.

Bogosian received a BA from Duke University in Political Science in 1973, an MPP from Harvard University's JFK School of Government in 1981, taught the Visiting Filmmaker's Master Class at Duke for 9 semesters and is entering his fifth year as an Assistant Professor of the Practice at Brown University.

Kevin Mahaney

Kevin Mahaney has been President and CEO of The Olympia Companies since 1988. The strength of his talents extend beyond the business world and bear testament to the level of capabilities he personally embodies and inspires in others.

A lifelong overachiever, Mahaney won an All-American selection in lacrosse in 1985 at Middlebury College, an Olympic Silver Medal in sailing and the prestigious title of Rolex Yachtsmen of the Year, both in 1992. Kevin beat cancer in 1993, founded and skippered the Americas Cup syndicate “Young America” in 1995, won a national age-group championship in snowboarding in 2004, and competitively bicycled all 2,241 miles of the 2005 Tour de France, to name just a few of his accomplishments.

Kevin received an A.B. with a Major in Economics and Minor in Physics from Middlebury College and an MBA from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, specializing in finance and concentrating in Business Policy. He was also awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Law from Thomas College in 1996. As a Trustee for the University of Maine’s seven-campus system, Kevin chaired the Physical Plant Committee, overseeing $1 billion in real estate.

Kevin has been a Trustee on the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Team Foundation and sits on the Board of Directors for the LifeFlight Foundation. Additionally, Kevin Mahaney is a Chairman of the Board for the Walkabout Foundation.

Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein was one of the most influential and innovative artists of the second half of the twentieth century. He is preeminently identified with Pop Art, a movement he helped originate, and his first fully achieved paintings were based on imagery from comic strips and advertisements and rendered in a style mimicking the crude printing processes of newspaper reproduction.

These paintings reinvigorated the American art scene and altered the history of modern art. Lichtenstein’s success was matched by his focus and energy, and after his initial triumph in the early 1960s, he went on to create an oeuvre of more than 5,000 paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, murals and other objects celebrated for their wit and invention.

Lichtenstein created three major series in the 1990s, each emblematic of his ongoing interest in solving pictorial problems.

The Interiors, mural-sized canvases inspired by a miniscule advertisement in an Italian telephone book, delve again into the perceptual ambiguities of reflections from windows and mirrors.

The Nudes reprise the theme of women in a romance-comic mode, which Lichtenstein had introduced in the 1960s and amplified in lush Surrealist-inspired beach scenes in the 1970s. As with the Interiors, there is ample quotation of elements from earlier canvases, the furniture of Lichtenstein’s painted world. He also used the series to investigate mixing chiaroscuro (which he devised with dots and shading) with flat areas of color.

This effect was brought to an ultimate pitch in his Chinese Landscapes, Lichtenstein’s final encounter with a monumental art tradition—and one of his most subtle. Configurations of land, water, mountains and air found in Song dynasty paintings and scrolls are simulated by softly drifting fields of graduated dots. None of Lichtenstein’s usual black outlines define the monochromatic forms, which heightens the contemplative and abstract quality of the series.

In August 1997, Lichtenstein fell ill with pneumonia. He died unexpectedly of complications from the disease on September 29, 1997, at the age of 73, in New York City.

(courtesy: lichtensteinfoundation.org/biography)