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Lot Essay
The glass vessel in general and drinking glass in particular, with the complex potentials offered by transparency, reflections, and flattened ovoid shapes, seem to have held special appeal for Lichtenstein in his investigation of pictorial three-dimensionality. Steven A. Nash
In Double Glass, Roy Lichtenstein translates his iconic two-dimensional visual language into three dimensions. Drawing on the legacy of seventeenth-century Dutch still life, the work reimagines the genre through its translation into the physicality of painted metal, asserting itself fully within three-dimensional space while maintaining a striking visual flatness. Lichtenstein holds these opposing conditions in tension: the sculpture occupies real space, yet reads as a two-dimensional image, its bold contours and graphic structuring collapse volume into surface while remaining entirely true to his signature style. Produced in an edition of three, with one example held in the collection of the Nasher Sculpture Center, Double Glass lingers in this instability, where the familiar language of still life begins to shift, and where perception itself must adjust to a work that never fully settles into either image or object.
Lichtenstein begins with the conventions of Dutch still life, but redirects them through a controlled system of line and color. In conventional still life painting, such as Still Life with a Glass and Oysters (circa 1640) by Jan Davidsz de Heem, the glass forms through accumulation: thin layers of paint register shifts in light, and strokes of white curve along the rim and body to mark reflection. These highlights indicate an external world. In Double Glass, that system disappears. The tall vessel stands as an open cylinder, divided into vertical bands of blue, yellow, black, and white, with diagonal striping cutting across select sections. The smaller glass repeats this structure at a compressed scale, its interior broken by flat shapes that suggest liquid without modeling it. White no longer traces reflected light; it appears as a solid plane, especially along the interior curves, where it reads less as illumination and more as a cut through the form. Black contour fixes each edge with precision, preventing any dissolution into space, while overlapping shapes imply depth without producing it. The glass does not absorb its environment or refract a surrounding world. Instead, it holds at the surface, its volume constructed through graphic means, shifting still life from a record of perception to a deliberate system of form.
The late 1970s mark a decisive shift in the practice of Roy Lichtenstein, as he redirects his focus from mass media imagery to the structures of art history and, more specifically, to the challenge of reflectiveness. In works such as Cubist Still Life (1974) and Still Life with Crystal Bowl (1972), he draws on the fractured planes of Pablo Picasso, yet replaces tonal construction with fixed bands of color and line, turning spatial ambiguity into a graphic system. This logic carries directly into Double Glass. It also aligns with Lichtenstein’s Mirror paintings, such as Mirror #1 (1969) and Oval Mirror (1974), where curved bands of white and gray signal reflection but contain no reflected image. In both cases, the surface does not receive the world; it asserts its own construction. Reflectiveness shifts from an observed phenomenon to a coded sign, allowing Lichtenstein to engage the visual language of still life while fundamentally restructuring how objects occupy and deny space.
Roy Lichtenstein brings his investigation of pictorial three-dimensionality into sharp focus through the glass vessel, a form that allows him to test how transparency, reflection, and structure can be translated into a controlled visual system. Double Glass stands as a culminating example, where interlocking forms and flattened ovoid shapes generate spatial ambiguity without relying on optical illusion, as “the glass vessel in general and drinking glass in particular, with the complex potentials offered by transparency, reflections, and flattened ovoid shapes, seem to have held special appeal for Lichtenstein in his investigation of pictorial three-dimensionality. At least four versions of a single glass predate the still more complex Double Glass, with its interlocking forms and increased spatial ambiguities” (S. A. Nash, quoted in A Century of Modern Sculpture: The Patsy and Raymond Nasher Collection, exh. cat., Dallas Museum of Art, 1987, p. 166). The present work gathers these concerns into a single, resolved structure, where graphic precision constructs volume and where the object sustains a deliberate tension between physical presence and visual flatness.
In Double Glass, Roy Lichtenstein translates his iconic two-dimensional visual language into three dimensions. Drawing on the legacy of seventeenth-century Dutch still life, the work reimagines the genre through its translation into the physicality of painted metal, asserting itself fully within three-dimensional space while maintaining a striking visual flatness. Lichtenstein holds these opposing conditions in tension: the sculpture occupies real space, yet reads as a two-dimensional image, its bold contours and graphic structuring collapse volume into surface while remaining entirely true to his signature style. Produced in an edition of three, with one example held in the collection of the Nasher Sculpture Center, Double Glass lingers in this instability, where the familiar language of still life begins to shift, and where perception itself must adjust to a work that never fully settles into either image or object.
Lichtenstein begins with the conventions of Dutch still life, but redirects them through a controlled system of line and color. In conventional still life painting, such as Still Life with a Glass and Oysters (circa 1640) by Jan Davidsz de Heem, the glass forms through accumulation: thin layers of paint register shifts in light, and strokes of white curve along the rim and body to mark reflection. These highlights indicate an external world. In Double Glass, that system disappears. The tall vessel stands as an open cylinder, divided into vertical bands of blue, yellow, black, and white, with diagonal striping cutting across select sections. The smaller glass repeats this structure at a compressed scale, its interior broken by flat shapes that suggest liquid without modeling it. White no longer traces reflected light; it appears as a solid plane, especially along the interior curves, where it reads less as illumination and more as a cut through the form. Black contour fixes each edge with precision, preventing any dissolution into space, while overlapping shapes imply depth without producing it. The glass does not absorb its environment or refract a surrounding world. Instead, it holds at the surface, its volume constructed through graphic means, shifting still life from a record of perception to a deliberate system of form.
The late 1970s mark a decisive shift in the practice of Roy Lichtenstein, as he redirects his focus from mass media imagery to the structures of art history and, more specifically, to the challenge of reflectiveness. In works such as Cubist Still Life (1974) and Still Life with Crystal Bowl (1972), he draws on the fractured planes of Pablo Picasso, yet replaces tonal construction with fixed bands of color and line, turning spatial ambiguity into a graphic system. This logic carries directly into Double Glass. It also aligns with Lichtenstein’s Mirror paintings, such as Mirror #1 (1969) and Oval Mirror (1974), where curved bands of white and gray signal reflection but contain no reflected image. In both cases, the surface does not receive the world; it asserts its own construction. Reflectiveness shifts from an observed phenomenon to a coded sign, allowing Lichtenstein to engage the visual language of still life while fundamentally restructuring how objects occupy and deny space.
Roy Lichtenstein brings his investigation of pictorial three-dimensionality into sharp focus through the glass vessel, a form that allows him to test how transparency, reflection, and structure can be translated into a controlled visual system. Double Glass stands as a culminating example, where interlocking forms and flattened ovoid shapes generate spatial ambiguity without relying on optical illusion, as “the glass vessel in general and drinking glass in particular, with the complex potentials offered by transparency, reflections, and flattened ovoid shapes, seem to have held special appeal for Lichtenstein in his investigation of pictorial three-dimensionality. At least four versions of a single glass predate the still more complex Double Glass, with its interlocking forms and increased spatial ambiguities” (S. A. Nash, quoted in A Century of Modern Sculpture: The Patsy and Raymond Nasher Collection, exh. cat., Dallas Museum of Art, 1987, p. 166). The present work gathers these concerns into a single, resolved structure, where graphic precision constructs volume and where the object sustains a deliberate tension between physical presence and visual flatness.