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Lot Essay
A master of manipulating artistic styles as well as the art historical canon, Roy Lichtenstein consistently challenged pictorial precedents as he created his inventive and playful works. In this direction, no motif is more pointed, or more pertinent, than his brushstroke, appropriated and transformed by the artist in multiple mediums. In his paintings and sculptures, Lichtenstein monumentalized the expressionistic brushstoke, a symbol for the celebrated abstract canvases created by the previous generation of abstract artists.
"Lichtenstein's Brushstroke chair take him at further remove from the playfulness of his Brushstroke paintings. He transmutes what is in essence the very symbol of fluidity and motion into a medium incorrigibly static and gravity bound, whose visual conventions to indicate motion are less established--less convincing--than those of the comic strip. Lichtenstein lifts the brushstroke from the canvas and thrusts it into space. The incongruity of the proposition that a brushstroke has heft and weight and must be borne on a base futher heightens the sculpture's comical implausibility. In Lichtenstein's removing the brushstroke image so far from its original source, from a source already vitiated by convention cliché by the time he turned to it, Lichtenstein actually reinvigorates, reforms the brushstroke cliché--and converts it to an icon set apart from its historical context, giving it an existence entirely its own (F. Tuten, Roy Lichtenstein: Bronze Sculpture 1976-1989, New York, 1989, p. 12).
(fig. 1) Little Big Painting, 1965, Whitney Museum of American Art,
"Lichtenstein's Brushstroke chair take him at further remove from the playfulness of his Brushstroke paintings. He transmutes what is in essence the very symbol of fluidity and motion into a medium incorrigibly static and gravity bound, whose visual conventions to indicate motion are less established--less convincing--than those of the comic strip. Lichtenstein lifts the brushstroke from the canvas and thrusts it into space. The incongruity of the proposition that a brushstroke has heft and weight and must be borne on a base futher heightens the sculpture's comical implausibility. In Lichtenstein's removing the brushstroke image so far from its original source, from a source already vitiated by convention cliché by the time he turned to it, Lichtenstein actually reinvigorates, reforms the brushstroke cliché--and converts it to an icon set apart from its historical context, giving it an existence entirely its own (F. Tuten, Roy Lichtenstein: Bronze Sculpture 1976-1989, New York, 1989, p. 12).
(fig. 1) Little Big Painting, 1965, Whitney Museum of American Art,