White paint and an exemplary installation currently give the Hayward Gallery an of-our-own-time presence. But the paintings by Roy Lichtenstein which line the walls - the early ones anyway - are now so well established as an ironic commentary on pop culture that they read as decoration, as conventional and period-flavoured in their way as chintz. The general effect of the show is cool and spacious. You could be in a fashion store which has decided to go retro and jazz up the decor. To see more than decorative wit you must try to think of the moment in 1962 when Lichtenstein's show of enlarged frames from war comics and romance comics at the Leo Castelli Gallery put out the news that another artist - he was not well known - had taken a sharp turn off the path most American high art was following.There are pictures in the Hayward show from right up to the last year of his life - 1997. In the Bernard Jacobson Gallery in Clifford Street, W1 you can see, until 27 March, the last things he did: prints of interiors in which the usual elements are used to such bland effect that they could have been turned out by a Lichtenstein computer-graphics program. The comic-strip frames, which are still the Lichtenstein pictures one thinks of first, are not in a majority at the Hayward, and the other subjects are connected with them only by the use he made of the accidents and conventions of cheap comic-book drawing and printing - heavy outlines, flat colour and coarse mechanical screens. Among them are hard-edged drawings of big fluid brush marks - a mockery of gestural art. Or perhaps a tribute to it. There are pictures of rooms, a car tyre, an exercise book and a golf ball. Right at the end are paintings in which graded tints show hills rising out of mist with a tiny kitsch-Oriental boat or bridge in the foreground. But only by going back to the original moment - the moment when Life magazine headed an article, 'Is He the Worst Artist in America?' - can you imagine the force of his transgression. LRB
