There's a print shop on my corner with a faded poster of it in the window, pink where the red has given up, which is how this came back to me. Stand in front of the real thing and the first thing is yellow. A wide flat yellow across the top of the right-hand canvas that doesn't shade into anything; it just stops where the red starts. Then you notice the seam. Two stretchers side by side, and the explosion crosses the join while the jet stays politely on its own canvas at the left.
Up close the dots are hand-work — paint pushed through a stencil, and here and there one sits heavy, or a hair off the grid. The panel he started from came out of a war comic from the year before, drawn by Irv Novick, a man working to a deadline for a few dollars a page, and I think of him whenever I stand there. Castelli hung it in 1963, on a herringbone floor like the one in the photograph with the man in the tweed jacket. Tate bought it three years later.
Fabien, that seam does what a cutting room does — jet on the left panel, explosion on the right, and your eye jumps the gap the way it jumps a shot-reverse-shot. The join is the cut. I've watched audiences read left to right and flinch on the second panel, same as a reaction shot landing.
Onomatopoeia is Greek for name-making, more or less — onoma plus poiein — which is a grand word for WHAAM. And the sound itself was a letterer's job, drawn by hand with a pen and a lettering guide, usually uncredited on the page, so Novick's deadline had a second man on it whose name nobody kept.