Brushstrokes in Flight

Roy Lichtenstein’s iconic sculpture Brushstrokes in Flight (1983) stands as a testament to the artist’s brilliance as a Pop Art pioneer, seamlessly blending his signature wit with an unrelenting drive to challenge and redefine artistic conventions. In Lichtenstein’s Brushstrokes series of paintings, his signature flat, comic book style—drawing inspiration from American comic books and pulp magazines—is utilized to depict the brushstrokes of an abstract painting. The present work is an expansion on the series, one in which Lichtenstein shifts mediums and disciplines, moving from painting to sculpture.

In this strikingly satirical piece, at once parody and tribute, Lichtenstein represents the bold, gestural brushstrokes of the Abstract Expressionist painters in his characteristic Pop Art style. Thick, animated brushstrokes careen from the sculpture’s base, rendered in bright colors and bold outlines, as though they’ve been lifted from the pages of a pulp magazine. Here, Lichtenstein is at his best, producing an insightful amalgam of two seemingly diametrically opposed postwar American art movements—taking the gestural brushstroke and rendering it in an entirely different medium. Depicting an abstract painting in such an archly mannered, ironic style constitutes a serious feat of both imagination and technique on Lichtenstein’s part. Brushstrokes in Flight is a testament to the unbridled creative impulse and sharp intellect behind the works of a Pop Art master.

The strongly gestural brushstrokes depicted in the present work emerge from the sculpture’s base, at first glance embodying the expressive will of an action painter in the vein of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, or Franz Kline. One is reminded of the totemic qualities of the modernist sculptures in Brâncuși’s Bird in Space series—the abstract forms of which parallel those in the present work. Notably, Lichtenstein paid direct homage to an iconic Brâncuși sculpture with his Paintings with Sleeping Muse, also from 1983. In Brushstrokes in Flight, the brushstrokes are made three-dimensional, rising up to become vertical figures in space. The artist’s dry wit is on full display—here, Lichtenstein transforms the gestural brushstrokes of abstract painting into a literal totem or monument, acknowledging their status as art historical and cultural signifiers while simultaneously poking fun at their semi-hallowed status.

Art critic Hal Foster aptly captures the essence of Lichtenstein’s Brushstrokes sculptures:

"These pieces exist between painting and sculpture in terms not only of genre but also of structure; where Minimalist objects are neither painting nor sculpture (at least according to Donald Judd), Pop objects tend to be both-and. If most representational painting is a two-dimensional encoding of three-dimensional objects, Lichtenstein reverses the process here and freezes it somewhere in between. Typically, he pushes a two-dimensional image toward a three-dimensional thing yet retains bits of the pictorial illusion as the image-object is displaced into actual space." (H. Foster, “Pop Pygmalion,” Roy Lichtenstein: Sculpture, London, 2005, p. 10).

This conceptual transposition of dimensions bears resemblance to, though not necessarily the visual characteristics of, the works of Pop sculptor Claes Oldenburg, whose creations magnify quotidian objects to monumental scales. It is this “both-and” quality intrinsic to Pop sculpture that Brushstrokes in Flight encapsulates most compellingly—the dual gesture of tribute to and critique of Abstract Expressionism and broader art historical motifs. Brushstrokes in Flight operates simultaneously as a playful deconstruction and a reverent celebration, embodying the high-low dialectics that render Lichtenstein’s oeuvre so captivating. Ultimately, Brushstrokes in Flight transcends mere visual pun; it asserts the enduring power of Pop Art to reconstruct and recontextualize the lexicon of art history and cultural iconography.