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Lot Essay
Two Paintings: Sleeping Muse is part of the 1980s series of works in which Lichtenstein depicts two paintings of iconic art images on a wall. While the appropriation of other artists is not new for Lichtenstein, this series portrays their work in a novel context, as framed pictures, close up and cropped to reveal only a section of the canvas.
In the present picture, Lichtenstein assembles together three canonical modern works of art, selecting a group of images so immediately recognizable that an abbreviated and simplified representation suffices to signal their source to the viewer. On the canvas to the left, he depicts a Matisse philodendron leaf cut-out above a Brancusi sleeping muse sculpture. On the canvas to the right, he shows the edge of an Abstract Expressionist painting. While these depictions do represent particular artists, they are interpreted through the Lichtenstein eye - flattened, simplified and stylized. By translating each of them into his own language, the artist equalizes them, allows them to compared at the same level and thus distills what comprises each artist's style. "Lichtenstein does not wish to submerge the original source for his paintings; he wishes to identify it" (D. Waldman, Roy Lichtenstein, London, 1971, p.11).
In his Two Paintings series, however, Lichtenstein goes beyond representing an artist's style; he offers a context for the paintings that undermines our sense of perception: "Lichtenstein presents a series of ambiguities, making one 'reality' contradict the other, and thus questions the absolute validity of human perception" (D. Waldman, Roy Lichtenstein, New York, 1993, p. 295). In the present work, the artist collapses three different levels of physicality - a sculpture, a paper cut-out, and a thickly painted picture - into a single plane, rendering them the same when we know that they are different. Furthermore, the painting on the left, illustrating a sculpture on a table in front of a cut-out, is once removed from the original object whereas the painting on the right is the object itself.
By cleverly juxtaposing familiar works from art history in an interior context, Lichtenstein creates an intriguing disjunction of reality at multiple levels, while paying homage to his predecessors who similarly grappled with the limits of human perception and of truthfully depicting of the material world.
(fig. 1) Roy Lichtenstein in 1984 with Sleeping Muse, 1983.
In the present picture, Lichtenstein assembles together three canonical modern works of art, selecting a group of images so immediately recognizable that an abbreviated and simplified representation suffices to signal their source to the viewer. On the canvas to the left, he depicts a Matisse philodendron leaf cut-out above a Brancusi sleeping muse sculpture. On the canvas to the right, he shows the edge of an Abstract Expressionist painting. While these depictions do represent particular artists, they are interpreted through the Lichtenstein eye - flattened, simplified and stylized. By translating each of them into his own language, the artist equalizes them, allows them to compared at the same level and thus distills what comprises each artist's style. "Lichtenstein does not wish to submerge the original source for his paintings; he wishes to identify it" (D. Waldman, Roy Lichtenstein, London, 1971, p.11).
In his Two Paintings series, however, Lichtenstein goes beyond representing an artist's style; he offers a context for the paintings that undermines our sense of perception: "Lichtenstein presents a series of ambiguities, making one 'reality' contradict the other, and thus questions the absolute validity of human perception" (D. Waldman, Roy Lichtenstein, New York, 1993, p. 295). In the present work, the artist collapses three different levels of physicality - a sculpture, a paper cut-out, and a thickly painted picture - into a single plane, rendering them the same when we know that they are different. Furthermore, the painting on the left, illustrating a sculpture on a table in front of a cut-out, is once removed from the original object whereas the painting on the right is the object itself.
By cleverly juxtaposing familiar works from art history in an interior context, Lichtenstein creates an intriguing disjunction of reality at multiple levels, while paying homage to his predecessors who similarly grappled with the limits of human perception and of truthfully depicting of the material world.
(fig. 1) Roy Lichtenstein in 1984 with Sleeping Muse, 1983.